Should've

How to spell should've

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce should've

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does should've mean?

1. verbA contraction of 'should have', expressing that something was advisable or expected but did not happen.

Should've in a sentence

• We should've booked the flights earlier to get the cheaper fare.

• I should've saved the file before the laptop crashed.

Where does should've come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a spoken contraction of 'should have'. The first element, 'should', descends from the Old English 'sceolde', the past tense of 'sculan', a verb that originally meant 'to owe' or 'to be obliged', and over centuries it softened into a marker of duty, advice, and expectation. The second element is the perfect auxiliary 'have', from Old English 'habban', meaning 'to hold' or 'to possess'. When the two run together in rapid speech, the unstressed 'have' collapses to a faint /əv/ sound, and writers represent that with the apostrophe and 've. The great spelling trap is that this reduced 'have' sounds exactly like the preposition 'of', which is why many fluent adults wrongly write 'should of'; remembering that the full phrase is always 'should have' fixes the spelling.

How the word is built

• should (past form expressing obligation or expectation)
• 've (contracted form of 'have')