Maybe
adverbPossibly but not certainly; perhaps.
How to spell maybe
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce maybe
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does maybe mean?
- adverbPossibly but not certainly; perhaps.
Maybe in a sentence
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Maybe the train will be late again this morning.
-
We should leave early, maybe around seven.
Where does maybe come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Maybe began life not as a single word but as the short clause 'it may be', a fluent way of saying that something is possible. Both halves are solidly native English of Germanic stock: 'may' descends from the Old English magan, meaning 'to be able' or 'to have the power to', while 'be' comes from the Old English beon, the ordinary verb of existence. During the late Middle Ages writers began collapsing the phrase 'it may be that...' into a tidy single adverb, and by the 1400s 'maybe' was treated as one word meaning 'perhaps'. The closely related 'perhaps' was built on a similar idea using 'hap', the old word for chance or luck. The spelling trap is purely psychological: because it sounds like two words, writers sometimes split it into 'may be', which is correct only when it is genuinely the verb 'be' following 'may'.
How the word is built
- may (auxiliary verb of possibility)
- be (verb of existence), fused from the phrase 'it may be'
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