was

[wuhz, woz, wuhz]

verb

1. first and third person singular past indicative of be.

was

/ wɒz, wəz /

verb

1. the past tense (indicative mood) of be 1

2. not_standard,  a form of the subjunctive mood used in place of were, esp in conditional sentences

   if the film was to be with you, would you be able to process it?

Word History and Origins

Origin of was¹

First recorded before 950; Middle English; Old English wæs, past tense singular of wesan “to be”; cognate with Old Frisian, Old High German, Gothic was, Old Norse var; wassail

Word History and Origins

Origin of was¹

Old English wæs, from wesan to be; related to Old Frisian, Old High German was, Old Norse var

Example Sentences

“But recently we saw there was a jump in the number of shoppers who are shopping right now for the holiday season,” he said last week.

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“What happened at Music Inn in the 1950s,” he argues, “was a remarkable confluence of place, people, and politics that reflected and augured seismic shifts and conflicts in American culture.”

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After 3½ decades of Francoism, during which, the author reminds us, the dictator “decided that Spaniards were too childish to govern themselves,” there was a palpable sense of a nation orphaned.

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The show’s new profiles include the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint: Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006 and was canonized in September by Pope Leo XIV.

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Former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says there was a time when “police families were fairly commonplace” in the NYPD.

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