Word.ws English Dictionary

oughts

UK/ɔːts/US/ɑːts/

oughts is the plural of ought.

oughts is the alternative spelling of aughts.

Meaning of ought

Noun

ought (plural oughts)

  1. (auxiliary, dialectal, formal, metaphysics) 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

See all 5 meanings of ought

Meaning of aughts

Noun

the aughts pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) The first decade of a century, such as 1900 to 1909 or 2000 to 2009, whose digit in the tens place is zero; the noughties.
    • The 20th Century’s Aughts and Teens: OPERETTA [chapter title]2010, Michael G. Cunningham, “The 20th Century’s Aughts and Teens: OPERETTA”, in Gilded Songs (Berlin to Bacharach): The Gig Instrumentalist’s Guide to the Golden Era of American Popular Song (1920...

See all 2 meanings of aughts

Words that rhyme with oughts

Questions about oughts

What is oughts the plural of?
Oughts is the plural of ought.
How do you pronounce oughts?
Oughts is pronounced /ɔːts/ (UK).

Words near oughts in the dictionary

  1. oughtism
  2. oughtn't
  3. oughtn't've
  4. oughtness
  5. oughtnesses
  6. oughts
  7. oughtst
  8. oughtta
  9. ougiya
  10. ougiyas
  11. ougly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: oughts (page history and authors); ought (page history and authors); aughts (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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Cite this entry: “oughts.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/oughts. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.