hypotheticaladj.n.

1665 R. Hooke Micrographia 236 The hypothetical height and density of the Air.

1822 Duke of Wellington Despatches (1867) I. 293 It would be..impossible..to declare..what would be our conduct upon any hypothetical case.

1860 J. Tyndall Glaciers of Alps ii. xxix. 401 Any other obstacle will produce the same effect as our hypothetical post.

1874 W. Stubbs Constit. Hist. I. iv. 63 A hypothetical colony from a hypothetical settlement on the Littus Saxonicum of Gaul.

1615 H. Crooke Μικροκοσμογραϕια 320 Hypotheticall or materiall necessitie.

1656 T. Hobbes Questions Liberty, Necessity & Chance 199 It is granted by all Divines, that an hypothetical necessity, or necessity upon supposition, may stand with liberty.

1678 R. Cudworth True Intellect. Syst. Universe i. iii. 138 The Necessity of a Plastick Life, which..Aristotle calls an Hypothetical Necessity.

1685 R. Baxter Paraphr. New Test. Acts i. 16 This must needs signifie no necessity or constraint put on Judas, but a necessity Hypothetical, and of consequence, that is, it cannot but be true which God foretelleth or foreseeth.

1717 S. Clarke tr. G. W. Leibniz in Papers between Leibnitz & Clarke 157 Hypothetical Necessity is that, which the Supposition or Hypothesis of God's Foresight and Pre-ordination lays upon future Contingents.

1654 Z. Coke Art of Logick 131 Let a compound or Hypothetical, never be put in the place of a conclusion, but only a simple or Categorical.

a1856 W. Hamilton Lect. Metaphysics (1860) IV. App. 378 Hypotheticals (Conjunctive and Disjunctive Syllogism).

1881 Athenæum 27 Aug. 269/2 As he used the logic of chance to elucidate the difficult subject of modals, so here he employs symbolic logic to cast light on hypotheticals.

1888 Hatch Hibbert Lect. (1891) 131 (transl. Greek author) If one advances any express statement of the divine Scripture, they try to find out whether it can form a conjunctive or a disjunctive hypothetical.

1892 H. Sweet New Eng. Gram. i. 108 We use tenses to express thought-statements in the hypothetical clauses of conditional sentences, as in if I knew his address, I would write to him.

1902 Low & Briggs Matric. Eng. Course i. xiii. 99 The subjunctive in the protasis is called conditional, that in the apodosis is called hypothetical.

1937 H. R. Stokoe Understanding of Syntax xiv. 132 Notice too that ‘Hypothetical’ is a better term (to mean expressing a ‘hypothesis’, ‘supposition’ or ‘ condition’) than ‘Conditional’, because this latter term is applied to the whole Sentence of which the ‘Hypothetical’ Clause is a part.

1946 A. M. Clark Spoken Eng. viii. 187 The protasis is a subordinate hypothetical clause (or clauses) introduced by if.., whether..or not.., unless.., though or although.., lest [etc.].

1961 R. B. Long Sentence & its Parts vi. 132 The verb forms used as hypothetical subjunctives are forms belonging to the four past tenses.

1985 R. Quirk et al. Comprehensive Gram. Eng. Lang. iv. 232 The past tense modals can be used in the hypothetical (or unreal) sense of the past tense..in both main and subordinate clauses.

1957 D. L. Bolinger in Publ. Amer. Dial. Soc. xxviii. 94 The verbs that freely absorb or do not absorb the negative are the high-frequency hypotheticals..suppose, imagine [etc.].

1972 W. Labov Lang. in Inner City iv. 138 Traditionally, relative clauses on any have also been understood as reduced hypotheticals.