/wɒz/ (British), /wʌz/ (American)
[verb] The past tense form of 'to be', used with singular subjects (I, he, she, it) to describe a state, condition, or existence that existed at a previous time. For example, 'She was happy' or 'It was cold outside.'
'Was' and 'is' come from two completely different ancient verbs that were fused together into one over thousands of years.
The word 'was' is one of the oldest and most fascinating survivors in the English language, stretching back thousands of years to a common ancestor that predates written history. It descends from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂wes-, meaning 'to dwell' or 'to remain', which carried a sense of staying in a place or continuing in a state. This ancient root gave rise to the Sanskrit word 'vasati' (he dwells) and the Old Persian 'ah' (was), showing just how wide and deep this single sound travelled across the ancient world.
In the Germanic languages, this root developed into the verb that would become 'was'. Old English had the form 'wæs', used as the singular past tense, alongside 'wǣron', used for the plural past tense. These forms belonged to a Proto-Germanic verb *wesaną, meaning 'to be' or 'to remain', and they were already distinct from the verbs that gave Old English its other forms of 'to be'. This is a clue to one of the most remarkable things about the word: it does not actually belong to the same verb family as 'is', 'am', or 'are'.
The English verb 'to be' is what linguists call a suppletive verb — a verb assembled from the parts of several different, originally unrelated verbs. 'Am' and 'is' come from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁es- (to be), giving us Old English 'eom' (am) and 'is'. 'Are' comes from a separate Proto-Germanic root *ar-. And 'was' and 'were' come from that third root, *h₂wes- (to dwell). Over centuries of use in Old English and then Middle English, these three separate verb families were stitched together into a single conjugation, the way a tailor might join three different fabrics into one seamless coat.
Through the Middle English period, roughly from the 12th to the 15th century, the forms stabilised. 'Wæs' became 'was', and the language gradually sorted out which forms applied to singular and which to plural subjects. By the time of Early Modern English — the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible — 'was' had settled into the role it plays today. You can read it in Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' (1599): 'He was my friend, faithful and just to me', where it functions almost exactly as we use it now.
What makes 'was' quietly extraordinary is that it is a ghost of an ancient idea — not simply 'existence' in the abstract, but the experience of dwelling, remaining, or inhabiting a moment or place. When you say 'I was there', you are unknowingly reaching back to a Proto-Indo-European concept of presence and dwelling that is at least six thousand years old. A word so common that most people never think about it carries within it one of the longest unbroken threads in the history of human language.