Word.ws English Dictionary

come to be

come to be verb: to come about; to come into being.

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

Forms of come to be

third-person singular presentcomes to be
present participlecoming to be
pastcame to be
past participlecome to be

Questions about come to be

What does come to be mean?
Come to be means to come about; to come into being.
What part of speech is come to be?
Come to be is a verb.
What is the past tense of come to be?
The past tense of come to be is came to be.

Words near come to be in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “come to be.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/come_to_be. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.