Were vs. was

Discussion in 'Word Mechanics' started by Twistedben, Feb 20, 2010.

  1. digitig

    digitig Contributor Contributor

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    Not interchangeable. There are some cases where swapping them would give very odd results:

    "It was raining yesterday", not "It were raining yesterday".
    "We were tired", not "We was tired".

    It's only in the subjunctive -- conditionals, counterfactuals, desires and so on -- that was and were are sometimes interchangeable. "Was" is possibly always safe nowadays, "Were" is perhaps better in some cases (you'll often hear "If I was you..." but I think "If I were you..." still sounds better, and some editors might insist on it).
     

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