Definition of AUGHT

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Pronoun

If you know aught which does behove my knowledge / Thereof to be inform'd, imprison't not / In ignorant concealment, Polixenes begs Camillo in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, employing the "anything" sense of "aught." Shakespeare didn't coin the pronoun "aught," which has been a part of the English language since before the 12th century, but he did put it to frequent use. Writers today may be less likely to use "aught" than were their literary predecessors, but the pronoun does continue to turn up occasionally. "Aught" can also be a noun meaning "zero," and for a while the phrase "the aughts" was bandied about as a proposed label for the decade that began in the year 2000.

Examples of aught in a Sentence

Noun

for dates, the year is automatically listed as a pair of aughts, so the user has to scroll down to the correct figure

Recent Examples on the Web: Noun

Perhaps the timing of Ditte and Nicolaj’s Ganni in the late aughts, ushering in a fresh interpretation of Scandinavian style, aligned well with our collective tiring of these mythical style icons. — Alexandra Ilyashov, Glamour, "How Ganni Came to Dictate Everything You Want to Wear Right Now," 10 Oct. 2018 ENTIREWORLD Designer Scott Sternberg, who rose to fashion industry darling status in the aughts with his preppy-meets-hipster label Band of Outsiders, describes his latest venture, launched online in April, as nonbasic basics. — Ray A. Smith, WSJ, "Designers Hope ‘Drops’ Make You Shop," 23 July 2018 Lee also publicly advocated for the storytelling potential in video games, famously saying the medium had surpassed film itself in the late aughts. — Nathan Mattise, Ars Technica, "Legendary Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee has died," 12 Nov. 2018 Unilever launched its ClearBlue Easy test, the first of its kind, in 1988, and the first digital test was released in the early aughts. — Elizabeth Kiefer, Allure, "Lia Is the Game-Changing Pregnancy Test You Can Flush Down the Toilet," 6 July 2018 In the late aughts, pirates off the coast of Somalia were hijacking a ship a week. — Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, "The Digital Vigilantes Who Hack Back," 30 Apr. 2018 Due to immigration crackdowns, economic after-effects of the late-aughts recession, and a lack of interest on the part of millennials, the field is down by 275,000 workers. — Amanda Abrams, Curbed, "Women are the solution to the construction industry’s labor shortage," 5 Nov. 2018 Carried by everyone from Paris Hilton to Carrie Bradshaw, the distinctly-shaped bag largely defined the fashion of the early aughts. — Lauren Alexis Fisher, Harper's BAZAAR, "Your Early 2000s Dream Bag Is Officially Back and Available To Shop Again," 19 July 2018 In Silicon Valley during the mid-aughts the conventional wisdom was that the internet gold rush was largely over. — Adam Fisher, WIRED, "Sex, Beer, and Coding: Inside Facebook’s Wild Early Days," 10 July 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'aught.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.