'altogether a year' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to the total amount of time it takes for something to happen or be accomplished over the course of a year. For example, "We estimate the project will take altogether a year to complete."
But it was only a consolation goal (Italy won 3-1) and his team went home in disgrace, with Breitner retiring from football altogether a year later.
1912 was altogether a year of death and disaster for the Bosse and Strindberg families: Alma Fahlstrøm's son Arne went down with the Titanic on 15 April; Strindberg's first wife Siri von Essen died later the same month; von Essen's and Strindberg's daughter Greta, a promising young actress, was killed in a train crash in June; and Bosse's divorced husband Gunnar Wingård shot himself on 7 October.
Americans altogether spend $40 billion a year on our lawns, an amount roughly equal to the entire federal tax revenue of India.
If it were worse, then I think we would have had a problem, but it's altogether a better year".
Growth then ceases altogether a few years after maturity.
He stopped choreographing for the troupe altogether; a few years later he ceded the artistic directorship to Mr. Voorintholt and began handling the business side.
Do you remember me telling you recently I gave up junk food altogether a few years ago?
Altogether, it took "a year of hard research" to isolate graphene and characterize those first electronic properties, Novoselov says.
Chávez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second home.
Grant Achatz, the chef-owner of Alinea, an avant-garde restaurant in Chicago, eliminated the tablecloths altogether, saving forty-two thousand dollars a year.
He conducted against King George III a long and brilliant vendetta; for this reason he was almost always in political opposition and, in fact, held high office for less than a year altogether.
