Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An event that could have but never did occur.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Someone or something whose potential greatness was not achieved.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an event that could have occurred but never did
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word might-have-been.
Examples
-
Given the ethical dilemmas, the future scenarios of many of the movies discussed here have been consigned to the realm of might-have-been sci-fi.
-
This is a fascinating might-have-been, a six episode script for the first season of Doctor Who telling the story of a murder conspiracy against Alexander the Great, by Moris Farhi.
More on Catherine Ashton nwhyte 2009
-
Maybe the glimpse (s) of suburban Manchester he got in the early 1950s were quite enough to feed his fantasies of that “provincial” might-have-been life.
-
Bear also does a great job of rewriting history here, with a dark version of 1938 that fits perfectly into might-have-been territory … Bear provides plenty of political intrigue, some tension and enough mythic conversation to make readers long for a mystical library collection of their own.
-
So to answer your question, yes—there are zero points in time wherein we could have changed a might-have-been to an is.
The Dragon’s Apprentice James A. Owen 2010
-
In some cases, a might-have-been can even be viewed, as this one once was, by Masters Wells, Verne, and Sigurdsson.
The Dragon’s Apprentice James A. Owen 2010
-
Iceland is a sobering might-have-been for the Greeks.
-
Would-be, wannabe, might-have-been, Moss is an incarnation of that combination of boulomaic modality and subjunctivity level so common in Crime and Realism, that of failure, of events that "should have happened, but did not".
Archive 2008-01-01 Hal Duncan 2008
-
Would-be, wannabe, might-have-been, Moss is an incarnation of that combination of boulomaic modality and subjunctivity level so common in Crime and Realism, that of failure, of events that "should have happened, but did not".
Freeform Critique Hal Duncan 2008
-
If so, a duo that could have created so much, and yet created so little, is just another might-have-been.
Blair's job was done by 1997: to numb Labour, and to enshrine Thatcherism 2010
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.