Word.ws English Dictionary

have reason

have reason verb: to be right.

Verb

have reason (third-person singular simple present has reason, present participle having reason, simple past and past participle had reason)

  1. (obsolete) To be right.
    • They would have no man use it as an interjection or exclamation, not to be alleaged as a witnesse or comparison, wherein I find they have reason.1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 56, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC
  2. To have grounds, justification etc. (to do something, or for something).
    • The finance minister had reason to be exasperated. Britain's economic future hinges on Europe, and this is no time for animus.2008 December 12, Martin Kettle, The Guardian

Forms of have reason

third-person singular presenthas reason
present participlehaving reason
past participlehad reason
pasthad reason

Origin of have reason

From have + reason, partly after Middle French avoir raison.

Words formed from have reason

  • have reason to believe

Questions about have reason

What does have reason mean?
Have reason means to be right.
What part of speech is have reason?
Have reason is a verb.
What is the past tense of have reason?
The past tense of have reason is had reason.

Words near have reason in the dictionary

  1. have other ideas
  2. have out
  3. have over
  4. have province
  5. have provinces
  6. have reason
  7. have respect of persons
  8. have second thoughts
  9. have seen better days
  10. have seen one's day
  11. have seen one's last gum tree

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: have reason (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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