not exactly

not exactly (not comparable)

1. Not or no.
   • 1872 May 11, Rhoda Broughton, “"Good-Bye Sweetheart!" a Tale”, in The Athenæum, number 2324, page 586:

     He is not exactly good-looking, but, on the contrary, extremely plain. He is not exactly good-tempered. He is not exactly steady or sober, or industrious, or even ambitious. He is, in fact, "ugly, irreligious, dissipated, ill-tempered."

   • 1911 August, May Sinclair, “Appearances”, in Good Housekeeping Magazine, volume 53, number 2, page 163:

     "Those two," he said. "They don't seem exactly your sort." "you mean," said she, "they are not exactly yours."

   • 2008, Toni McGee Causey, Bobbie Faye's (kinda, sorta, not exactly) Family Jewels, page 5:

     Not exactly a red-letter day for gun safety.

   • 2011, Scott Honey, Not Exactly the Finest Kind, page 19:

     Just bartending for a while and playing to sparse bar crowds with just his acoustic and a PA, although not exactly the best way to pad the retirement fund that he had blown during his fifteen seconds of fame or make your mark on the world, would have to do.

2. Not quite; nearly.
   • 1878, Robert Gordon Latham, Outlines of general or developmental philology. Inflection, page 78:

     But even in French they are not exactly what we want, not exactly the counterparts to the verbals like hunter.

   • 2007, Andrew Caldecott, Not Exactly Ghosts, page i:

     For a start, as the title of his first collection of short tales suggests, they are not exactly ghost stories, although most involve characters who in their own particular way are haunted.

   • 2012, Kees van Deemter, Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness, page 148:

     Once again, the boundary is not exactly correct. Some speakers would be better modelled by a somewhat lower boundary and others by a higher one.

• When used as a negation, the phrase acts to either soften the effect of the negation, or when used ironically, to emphasize it.

• not quite
• somewhat

• “not exactly”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “not exactly”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
• “not exactly” in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman.