Wast

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. You were, as in archaic or biblical speech addressing a single person in past time
2. The archaic second person singular form of the verb be in the past tense, used in older English texts
3. An obsolete or poetic form meaning you were, employed in early modern and biblical English

Etymology: "Wast" is the second-person singular past tense of "be," the form once used with "thou," as in "thou wast." It is a plain grammatical formation: "was" with the ending "-est," the same ending found in other old second-person verb forms such as "wilt" and "shalt." The ending is what marks the "thou" form, so "wast" carries the same meaning as "was" while signalling an address to one person in the older pronoun system. The form appeared in Late Middle English, and its use declined as "thou" fell out of ordinary speech, leaving it mainly in religious texts, poetry and deliberately archaic writing. Today it survives chiefly in the King James Bible and in literary or ceremonial language.