in fact

From fact (“deed, action”) (now obsolete, except in law)

in fact

1. (law) Resulting from the actions of parties.
2. (modal) Actually, in truth.

   People think tomatoes are vegetables, but, in fact, they are fruits.

   • 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 3, in The Celebrity:

     Now all this was very fine, but not at all in keeping with the Celebrity's character as I had come to conceive it. The idea that adulation ever cloyed on him was ludicrous in itself. In fact I thought the whole story fishy, and came very near to saying so.

   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., 55 Fifth Avenue, [1933], OCLC 2666860, page 0016:

     A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire. In fact, that arm-chair had been an extravagance of Mrs. Bunting. She had wanted her husband to be comfortable after the day's work was done, and she had paid thirty-seven shillings for the chair.

   • 2015 August 8, Bob Holmes, Ocean hills yield secret ecosystems, New Scientist, Issue 3033, page 14,

     We tend to think of the seafloor a few kilometres down as a flat plain. In fact, about two-thirds of this “abyssal” seabed is made up of gentle rolling hills a few hundred metres high, says Jennifer Durden at the University of Southampton, UK.

• (in truth): as a matter of fact; see also Thesaurus:actually

• (resulting from the actions of parties): in law