Methought

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. It was an opinion or belief held by someone about a matter
2. To consider or believe something to be true in one's own mind
3. To have a personal impression or suspicion about a fact or idea

Etymology: Old English had a verb "þyncan" meaning "to seem," but it was used in a peculiar construction: the person who experienced the seeming was put in the dative case, so "it seemed to me" was literally "to me it seemed." The Old English form "mē þūhte" is the past tense of this impersonal verb, with "mē" the dative of "I." Over time the pronoun and verb fused in speech and writing, and "methought" came to mean "it seemed to me" and later "I thought" in the sense of having an impression or suspicion. The structure survives in other older English forms, such as "methinks," which shows the same dative pronoun attached to a verb of seeming. The pronoun "me" here is not an object of a verb of thinking; it is the person to whom the seeming happens. Modern English has lost the dative pattern, so readers meet it today as a single archaic word, even though it is really a short sentence.

Synonyms: I thought, it seemed to me