Word of the Day
: August 8, 2007aught
playWhat It Means
1 : anything
2 : all, everything
aught in Context
"Xury said it was a lion, and it might be so for aught I know." (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe)
Did You Know?
"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.
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
