"come to be" meaning in English

See come to be in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Forms: comes to be [present, singular, third-person], coming to be [participle, present], came to be [past], come to be [participle, past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|<,,came,come>}} come to be (third-person singular simple present comes to be, present participle coming to be, simple past came to be, past participle come to be)
  1. To come about; to come into being
    Sense id: en-come_to_be-en-verb-VKYJsdSQ Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries

Inflected forms

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "comes to be",
      "tags": [
        "present",
        "singular",
        "third-person"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "coming to be",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "present"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "came to be",
      "tags": [
        "past"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "come to be",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "past"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "<,,came,come>"
      },
      "expansion": "come to be (third-person singular simple present comes to be, present participle coming to be, simple past came to be, past participle come to be)",
      "name": "en-verb"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "verb",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              98,
              108
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 23:",
          "text": "All naturally occurring dialects of any language have strong communicative value: That’s how they came to be.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "To come about; to come into being"
      ],
      "id": "en-come_to_be-en-verb-VKYJsdSQ",
      "links": [
        [
          "come about",
          "come about"
        ],
        [
          "come into being",
          "come into being"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "come to be"
}

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "comes to be",
      "tags": [
        "present",
        "singular",
        "third-person"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "coming to be",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "present"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "came to be",
      "tags": [
        "past"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "come to be",
      "tags": [
        "participle",
        "past"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "<,,came,come>"
      },
      "expansion": "come to be (third-person singular simple present comes to be, present participle coming to be, simple past came to be, past participle come to be)",
      "name": "en-verb"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "verb",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English verbs",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              98,
              108
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 23:",
          "text": "All naturally occurring dialects of any language have strong communicative value: That’s how they came to be.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "To come about; to come into being"
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "come about",
          "come about"
        ],
        [
          "come into being",
          "come into being"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "come to be"
}

Download raw JSONL data for come to be meaning in English (1.2kB)

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-08-28 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-08-05 using wiktextract (872fc7b and 4deed51). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.