Word.ws English Dictionary

came to be

came to be is the simple past of come to be.

Meaning of come to be

Verb

come to be (third-person singular simple present comes to be, present participle coming to be, simple past came to be, past participle come to be)

  1. To come about; to come into being
    • All naturally occurring dialects of any language have strong communicative value: That’s how they came to be.2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 23

Questions about came to be

What is came to be the simple past of?
Came to be is the simple past of come to be.

Words near came to be in the dictionary

  1. came to a sticky end
  2. came to a stop
  3. came to an end
  4. came to anchor
  5. came to bat
  6. came to be
  7. came to bed
  8. came to blows
  9. came to fruition
  10. came to grief
  11. came to grips with

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: came to be (page history and authors); come to be (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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