conditional tense

noun

conditional tense

noun

1

The conditional mood.

But he is stopped short by vocabulary, by the conditional tense, by that way of speaking that shifts everything into the hypothetical, into an imagined existence that could or could not be true.2019, Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King, Canongate Books (2020), page 341:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.