might-have-been
might-have-been noun: someone or something whose potential greatness was not achieved.
Noun
might-have-been (plural might-have-beens)
- Someone or something whose potential greatness was not achieved.
- But no more imposing might-have-been was there in Great Britain than the Glasgow & North Western Railway, which was intended to run from Glasgow to Inverness via Glencoe and the Great Glen.1955 January, C. Hamilton Ellis, “The Glasgow & North Western Railway”, in Railway Magazine, page 47
- One of the might-have-beens of railway history, however, would have altered the appearance of Monsal Dale considerably. The western portion of the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway (projected in 1891), from Chesterfield to Warrington, was planned to cross the dale and the Midland Line by...1960 March, J. P. Wilson, E. N. C. Haywood, “The route through the Peak - Derby to Manchester: Part One”, in Trains Illustrated, page 157
- Synonyms:
- could-have-been
Synonyms of might-have-been
- could-have-been
Forms of might-have-been
| plural | might-have-beens |
|---|
Questions about might-have-been
- What does might-have-been mean?
- Might-have-been means someone or something whose potential greatness was not achieved.
- What part of speech is might-have-been?
- Might-have-been is a noun.
- What is the plural of might-have-been?
- The plural of might-have-been is might-have-beens.
Words near might-have-been in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: might-have-been (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-might-have-been.wav.
Cite this entry: “might-have-been.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/might-have-been. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.