The word “would” is a modal verb used to indicate intention, habitual actions, hypothetical situations, or polite requests. Writers use it to express past habits, imagined scenarios, and conditional events. The examples below are drawn from authentic works to show how “would” appears in real writing.
Real Sentences for Would
It would grow up to be a man, a human soul, with a personality all its own, a will of its own!
Source: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
22 words, 94 characters
As to the details of his life during these years he was very reticent, in fact he would not talk of them at all.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
24 words, 112 characters
Left alone in the study, I opened the safe and withdrew the contents of the drawer in which he had told me I would find my instructions.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
27 words, 136 characters
She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a person or two shouldn’t lose a benefit by not submitting if they could be made to submit.
Source: The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
30 words, 150 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
As Powell was familiar with the country, as well as with the mechanical requirements of mining we determined that it would be best for him to make the trip.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
29 words, 156 characters
I have often heard my father caution him against his wild recklessness, but he would only laugh, and say that the tumble that killed him would be from the back of a horse yet unfoaled.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
35 words, 184 characters
He told me at this time that if anything should happen to him he wished me to take charge of his estate, and he gave me a key to a compartment in the safe which stood in his study, telling me I would find his will there and some personal instructions which he had me pledge myself to carry out with absolute fidelity.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
63 words, 317 characters
The morning of Powell’s departure was, like nearly all Arizona mornings, clear and beautiful; I could see him and his little pack animals picking their way down the mountainside toward the valley, and all during the morning I would catch occasional glimpses of them as they topped a hog back or came out upon a level plateau.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
57 words, 325 characters
He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
64 words, 339 characters
He was, when others were with him, the same genial, happy fellow we had known of old, but when he thought himself alone I have seen him sit for hours gazing off into space, his face set in a look of wistful longing and hopeless misery; and at night he would sit thus looking up into the heavens, at what I did not know until I read his manuscript years afterward.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
71 words, 363 characters
More examples coming soon.
