ought
UK/ɔːt/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
Australia/oːt/
ought is the simple past of owe.
ought is the alternative spelling of aught.
Verb
ought
- Indicating duty or obligation.
- I ought to vote in the coming election.
- Indicating advisability or prudence.
- You ought to always stand back from the edge of the platform.
- Do you think we ought to leave now?
- Synonyms:
- should
- Indicating desirability.
- He ought to read the book; it was very good.
- Synonyms:
- should
- Indicating likelihood or probability.
- We ought to arrive by noon if we take the motorway, shouldn't we?
- My hopes wa'n't disappointed. I never saw clams thicker than they was along them inshore flats. I filled my dreener in no time, and then it come to me that 'twouldn't be a bad idee to get a lot more, take 'em with me to Wellmouth, and peddle 'em out. Clams was fairly scarce over that side of the...1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter III, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
- Synonyms:
- should
Meaning of owe
Verb
owe (third-person singular simple present owes, present participle owing, simple past owed or (archaic) ought, past participle owed or (archaic) ought or (archaic) own)
- To be under an obligation to give something back to someone or to perform some action for someone.
- We owe it to our children to make our nation a better place to live in the future.
- To have debt; to be in debt.
- To have as a cause; used with to.
- The record owes its success to the outstanding guitar solos.
Meaning of aught
Pronoun
aught
- Anything whatsoever, any part.
- for aught I know/care
Noun
ought (plural oughts)
- A statement of what ought to be the case as contrasted with what is the case.
- There are value judgments that are not reducible to observable matters of fact, and there are oughts that cannot be construed as hypothetical and, therefore, cannot be converted into statements of fact.1996, Mortimer Jerome Adler, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense
- Is there a fallacy involved in deriving an ought from a set of exclusively factual or descriptive premises?2004, Jacques Maritain, John G. Trapani, Truth Matters: Essays in Honor of Jacques Maritain
Synonyms of ought
Forms of ought
| plural | oughts |
|---|
Origin of ought
From Middle English oughte, aughte, aȝte, ahte, from Old English āhte, first and third person singular past tense of Old English āgan (“to own, possess”), equivalent to owe + -t. Cognate with Sanskrit ईश्वर (īśvará, “capable of, liable”).
Words formed from ought
Words that rhyme with ought
Questions about ought
- What does ought mean?
- Ought means indicating duty or obligation.
- What is ought the simple past of?
- Ought is the simple past of owe.
- What part of speech is ought?
- Ought can be a verb or a noun.
- How do you pronounce ought?
- Ought is pronounced /ɔːt/ (UK).
Words near ought in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ought (page history and authors); owe (page history and authors); aught (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-aught.ogg.
Cite this entry: “ought.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ought. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.