would
/wəd/ verb, noun
Also a form of will
Forms woulds wou'd
- verb Used to form the "anterior future", or "future in the past", indicating a futurity relative to a past time. “On my first day at University, I met the woman who would become my wife.”
- verb Used to, did repeatedly, habitually; indicates an action that happened several times in the past (cannot describe continuous states, as in I used to live in London)
- verb Was or were determined to; indicating someone's insistence upon doing something.
- verb (archaic) Wanted to.
- verb (archaic) Used with ellipsis of the infinitive verb, or postponement to a relative clause, in various senses.
- verb (obsolete) Wished, desired (something).
- verb Used as the auxiliary of the simple conditional modality, indicating a state or action that is conditional on another. “If I won the lottery, I would give half the money to charity.”
- verb Without explicit condition, or with loose or vague implied condition, indicating a hypothetical or imagined state or action. “I would love to come and visit.”
- noun Something that would happen, or would be the case, under different circumstances; a potentiality.
Synonyms
Etymology
From Old English wolde, past tense of willan, predecessor of will.
The loss of /l/ in this word is probably due to weak stress, as in should and could (though in the latter, the /l/ was due to the analogy of the former two).
Webster’s 1913
- verb Commonly used as an auxiliary verb, either in the past tense or in the conditional or optative present. See 2d & 3d Will.
- noun See 2d Weld.
Etymology [OE. & AS. wolde. See Will, v. t.]
Sources: Wiktionary · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “would”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details