Afterwards

How to spell afterwards

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce afterwards

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does afterwards mean?

1. adverbAt a later time; subsequently, after an event has finished.

Afterwards in a sentence

• We toured the factory and had lunch afterwards.

• The meeting ran long, so we discussed the budget afterwards.

Where does afterwards come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending directly from the Old English aefterweard, which combined aefter, meaning 'after' or 'behind', with the directional suffix -weard, meaning 'turned towards' or 'in the direction of'. That same -weard element survives today in words like toward, forward, and backward, where it still signals direction or orientation. The trailing -s is an old adverbial genitive ending, the same grammatical -s that gives us besides, towards, and always; it marks the word as an adverb rather than an adjective. Because both the -ward and the -s arrived through ordinary Germanic word-building rather than any foreign borrowing, afterwards has kept a very plain, transparent spelling, and the chief trap for writers is simply remembering the final -s, since the bare form afterward (more common in American usage) is also valid. The word has been in continuous English use for well over a thousand years, shifting only slightly from a sense of physical 'behind' to the modern, purely temporal sense of 'at a later time'.

How the word is built

• after (following in time)
• -ward (in the direction of)
• -s (adverbial genitive ending)