Definition of "anything"

Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.

1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […]

In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%.

2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8837, page 74

Perhaps it was this atmosphere of misplacedness and loneliness as much as anything which led her to speak to him one evening in early summer when the office had closed.

1916, Edward S. Moffat, Go Forth and Find, pages 81–82

How long does it take to turn you actors into good anythings?

1986, David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

So we tried not to talk about first or second anythings until our meeting with the rabbi.

2007 May 6, Cindy Chupack, “An Ancient Coda to My 21st-Century Divorce”, in New York Times‎