Definition, synonyms and related words
Something that would happen, or would be the case, under different circumstances; a potentiality.
"If you had asked earlier, I would have been able to help you immediately."
"The baseball player caught three wild pitches that would have gone over his head if he hadn't reacted so quickly."
Past tense of will.
"When I was younger, I would run five miles every morning before school."
Used with bare infinitive to form the "anterior future", or "future in the past", indicating a futurity relative to a past time.
"She said that she would call me later that evening."
In plain English: Would is used to talk about something you want to do, are likely to happen, or might have done in the past.
"She would often wait for her friend at the bus stop every afternoon."
Would comes from the Old English word wolde, which was originally the past tense of willan (the ancestor of "will"). The loss of the 'l' sound likely occurred because the word was unstressed, similar to how it happened in "should" and "could."