want
/wɑnt/ verb A1- To wish for or desire (something); to feel a need or desire for; to crave, hanker, or demand. · I want you as a friend, not a foe.· What do you want to eat? I want you to leave. I never wanted to go back to live with my mother.
- To make it easy or tempting to do something undesirable, or to make it hard or challenging to refrain from doing it. · The game developers of Candy Crush want you to waste large, copious amounts of your money on in-game purchases to buy boosters and lives.
- To wish, desire, or demand to see, have the presence of or do business with. · Ma’am, you are exactly the professional we want for this job.· Danish police want him for embezzlement.
- To desire (to experience desire); to wish. · You can leave if you want.
- To be advised to do or aim for something (compare should, ought). · You’ll want to repeat this three or four times to get the best result.
- To lack and be in need of or require (something, such as a noun or verbal noun). · That chair wants fixing and a clean.· What you really want is a good smack!
- To be lacking or deficient or absent. · There was something wanting in the play.
- To be in a state of destitution; to be needy; to lack. · The paupers desperately want.
Plural want · He/she/it wants · Past wanted · Past participle wanted · -ing form wanting
Verb forms
- Base form
- want
- He/she/it
- wants
- Past
- wanted
- Past participle
- wanted
- -ing form
- wanting
Phrasal verbs and expressions
From the library
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it _would_ twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.
“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”
_And what were childhood, wanting you?_
I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go!
Other matches
Learn want in real texts
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