See woulda, coulda, shoulda in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "phrase"
},
"expansion": "woulda, coulda, shoulda",
"name": "head"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "phrase",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English coordinated triples",
"parents": [
"Coordinated triples",
"Terms by etymology"
],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
"Entries with incorrect language header",
"Entry maintenance"
],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Entries with translation boxes",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Pages with 1 entry",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Pages with entries",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Terms with Dutch translations",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Terms with French translations",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Terms with German translations",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Terms with Spanish translations",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1995 November 17, A. M. Rosenthal, “The Great Botch-Up”, in New York Times, retrieved 2015-06-16:",
"text": "President Clinton . . . had his clear shot at health-care reform, if we need it, he and his wife, but they blew it. As Mrs. Clinton might say, woulda coulda shoulda.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2006 February 21, Mike Rowbottom, “Retirement talk works wonders for Dorfmeister”, in Independent, UK, retrieved 2015-06-16:",
"text": "Rahlves described the team's overall skiing performance here as, \"woulda, shoulda, coulda—all that stuff. It sucks—we definitely came up very short.\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2008 July 7, David Van Biema, Tim McGirk, “Was Jesus' Resurrection a Sequel?”, in Time, retrieved 2015-06-16:",
"text": "[S]uch a contentious reading of the 87-line tablet depends on creative interpretation of a smudged passage, making it the latest entry in the woulda/coulda/shoulda category of possible New Testament artifacts.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2014 December 18, Doug Smith, “Three things to ponder from easy Raptors win”, in Toronto Star, Canada, retrieved 2015-06-18:",
"text": "[H]e was talking about last night’s game and what it would have meant to have this roster last spring. . . .\n“Shoulda, coulda, woulda” he started. “If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas, right?”",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"An expression of dismissiveness or disappointment concerning a statement, question, explanation, course of action, or occurrence involving hypothetical possibilities, uncertain facts, or missed opportunities.'New York Times, May 15, 1994): \"The order of words in this delicious morsel of dialect varies with the user. . . . In this rhyming compound, a triple elision does the hat trick: although each elision expresses something different, when taken together, the trio conveys a unified meaning. Shoulda, short for should have (and not should of, which lexies call a variant but I call a mistake), carries a sense of correctness or obligation; coulda implies a possibility, and woulda denotes conditional certainty, an oxymoron: the stated intent to have taken an action if only something had not intervened. . . . Taken together, the term means 'Spare me the useless excuses.'\" (This stems from expressing that someone could have, would have and/or should have done something)"
],
"id": "en-woulda,_coulda,_shoulda-en-phrase-y1lJ1lHo",
"links": [
[
"dismissiveness",
"dismissiveness#English"
],
[
"disappointment",
"disappointment#English"
],
[
"hypothetical",
"hypothetical#English"
],
[
"possibilities",
"possibility#English"
],
[
"uncertain",
"uncertain#English"
],
[
"fact",
"fact#English"
],
[
"missed",
"missed#English"
],
[
"opportunities",
"opportunity#English"
],
[
"could have",
"could've"
],
[
"would have",
"would've"
],
[
"should have",
"should've"
]
],
"related": [
{
"word": "could have, would have, should have"
},
{
"word": "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
},
{
"word": "too little, too late"
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "shoulda, coulda, woulda"
},
{
"word": "shoulda, woulda, coulda"
},
{
"word": "woulda, shoulda, coulda"
},
{
"word": "coulda, shoulda, woulda"
},
{
"word": "coulda, woulda, shoulda"
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "nl",
"lang": "Dutch",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "as is verbrande turf"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "yavéka (il n’y avait qu’à)"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "yfalé (il fallait)"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette"
},
{
"code": "es",
"lang": "Spanish",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "otro gallo cantaría"
}
]
}
],
"word": "woulda, coulda, shoulda"
}
{
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "phrase"
},
"expansion": "woulda, coulda, shoulda",
"name": "head"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "phrase",
"related": [
{
"word": "could have, would have, should have"
},
{
"word": "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
},
{
"word": "too little, too late"
}
],
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"English coordinated triples",
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English lemmas",
"English multiword terms",
"English phrases",
"English terms with quotations",
"Entries with translation boxes",
"Pages with 1 entry",
"Pages with entries",
"Terms with Dutch translations",
"Terms with French translations",
"Terms with German translations",
"Terms with Spanish translations"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1995 November 17, A. M. Rosenthal, “The Great Botch-Up”, in New York Times, retrieved 2015-06-16:",
"text": "President Clinton . . . had his clear shot at health-care reform, if we need it, he and his wife, but they blew it. As Mrs. Clinton might say, woulda coulda shoulda.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2006 February 21, Mike Rowbottom, “Retirement talk works wonders for Dorfmeister”, in Independent, UK, retrieved 2015-06-16:",
"text": "Rahlves described the team's overall skiing performance here as, \"woulda, shoulda, coulda—all that stuff. It sucks—we definitely came up very short.\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2008 July 7, David Van Biema, Tim McGirk, “Was Jesus' Resurrection a Sequel?”, in Time, retrieved 2015-06-16:",
"text": "[S]uch a contentious reading of the 87-line tablet depends on creative interpretation of a smudged passage, making it the latest entry in the woulda/coulda/shoulda category of possible New Testament artifacts.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2014 December 18, Doug Smith, “Three things to ponder from easy Raptors win”, in Toronto Star, Canada, retrieved 2015-06-18:",
"text": "[H]e was talking about last night’s game and what it would have meant to have this roster last spring. . . .\n“Shoulda, coulda, woulda” he started. “If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas, right?”",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"An expression of dismissiveness or disappointment concerning a statement, question, explanation, course of action, or occurrence involving hypothetical possibilities, uncertain facts, or missed opportunities.'New York Times, May 15, 1994): \"The order of words in this delicious morsel of dialect varies with the user. . . . In this rhyming compound, a triple elision does the hat trick: although each elision expresses something different, when taken together, the trio conveys a unified meaning. Shoulda, short for should have (and not should of, which lexies call a variant but I call a mistake), carries a sense of correctness or obligation; coulda implies a possibility, and woulda denotes conditional certainty, an oxymoron: the stated intent to have taken an action if only something had not intervened. . . . Taken together, the term means 'Spare me the useless excuses.'\" (This stems from expressing that someone could have, would have and/or should have done something)"
],
"links": [
[
"dismissiveness",
"dismissiveness#English"
],
[
"disappointment",
"disappointment#English"
],
[
"hypothetical",
"hypothetical#English"
],
[
"possibilities",
"possibility#English"
],
[
"uncertain",
"uncertain#English"
],
[
"fact",
"fact#English"
],
[
"missed",
"missed#English"
],
[
"opportunities",
"opportunity#English"
],
[
"could have",
"could've"
],
[
"would have",
"would've"
],
[
"should have",
"should've"
]
]
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "shoulda, coulda, woulda"
},
{
"word": "shoulda, woulda, coulda"
},
{
"word": "woulda, shoulda, coulda"
},
{
"word": "coulda, shoulda, woulda"
},
{
"word": "coulda, woulda, shoulda"
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "nl",
"lang": "Dutch",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "as is verbrande turf"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "yavéka (il n’y avait qu’à)"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "yfalé (il fallait)"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette"
},
{
"code": "es",
"lang": "Spanish",
"sense": "expression of dismissiveness",
"word": "otro gallo cantaría"
}
],
"word": "woulda, coulda, shoulda"
}
Download raw JSONL data for woulda, coulda, shoulda meaning in English (4.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). 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.