Word.ws English Dictionary

for to

for to conjunction: expressing purpose: in order to.

Conjunction

for to

  1. (obsolete outside dialect or poetic use) Expressing purpose: in order to.
    • What went ye out for to see?1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Luke 7:25
    • Farewell! Farewell! / Farewell, my fairy fay! / Oh, I'm off to Louisiana / For to see my Susy Anna, / Singing, "Polly-wolly-doodle" all the day!c. 1843, “Polly-Wolly-Doodl[e]”, in Hoyt Parmelee et al., compilers, A Collection of Songs and Ballads as Sung by Alpha Kappa Phi and Germanæ Sodales Societies, of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale...
  2. (obsolete outside dialect or poetic use) As a general infinitive marker.
    • It does me good fur to look at you, Pip.1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter I, in Great Expectations […], volume III, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 10
    • In the desert you can remember your name, / 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain1971, Dewey Bunnell, “A Horse with No Name”, performed by America

Origin of for to

for + to, compare Scots for tae, Danish for at, Norwegian for å, Swedish för att.

Questions about for to

What does for to mean?
For to means expressing purpose: in order to.
What part of speech is for to?
For to is a conjunction.

Words near for to in the dictionary

  1. for the world
  2. for the worse
  3. for this once
  4. for thy
  5. for time
  6. for to
  7. for toffee
  8. for two pins
  9. for very shame's sake
  10. for Wales
  11. for want of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: for to (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: “for to.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/for_to. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.