Here you’ll find examples of “When” taken directly from published works. These real-life uses highlight how writers put the word into action and provide insight into its place in everyday writing.
Real Sentences for When
When the war broke out he left us, nor did I see him again for some fifteen or sixteen years.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
20 words, 93 characters
The watchman related the few details connected with the finding of the body, which he said had been still warm when he came upon it.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
25 words, 133 characters
His property was left in such a way that I was to receive the entire income for twenty-five years, when the principal was to become mine.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
26 words, 138 characters
Possibly I had conjured up impossible dangers, like some nervous old housewife, and when I should catch up with Powell would get a good laugh for my pains.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
28 words, 155 characters
When he returned it was without warning, and I was much surprised to note that he had not aged apparently a moment, nor had he changed in any other outward way.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
31 words, 160 characters
There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
38 words, 192 characters
There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39 words, 196 characters
I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me—“How I, when a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?”
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
42 words, 212 characters
What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye—my childhood’s companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
40 words, 218 characters
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
Source: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
51 words, 261 characters
I know that the average human mind will not believe what it cannot grasp, and so I do not purpose being pilloried by the public, the pulpit, and the press, and held up as a colossal liar when I am but telling the simple truths which some day science will substantiate.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
51 words, 268 characters
It lay, he said, stretched full length in the snow with the arms outstretched above the head toward the edge of the bluff, and when he showed me the spot it flashed upon me that it was the identical one where I had seen him on those other nights, with his arms raised in supplication to the skies.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
58 words, 297 characters
More examples coming soon.
