Used in a Sentence

ought

How to use ought in a sentence. Example sentences and definitions for ought.

Editorial note

That's what ought to keep people awake at night.

Examples14
Definitions0
Parts of speech1

Quick take

That's what ought to keep people awake at night.

Example sentences

1

That's what ought to keep people awake at night.

2

Whoever wrote or approved this post ought to be fired. Fast.

3

Legal or not, this looks, smells, and feels so obviously wrong, it ought to be illegal.

4

If you don't have Flash, I will show you how to get it, but I'm not going to spend the time telling you why you ought to get it, because I don't care to argue the point. There aren't enough people without Flash for it to be a concern.

5

Rather, this is a pretty interesting look into what it actually entails to make what ought to be a very simple and straightforward change. It turns out that these simple changes are hard!

6

"Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense; benefits ought to be handed ought drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more." - Niccolo Machiavelli

7

If that's the case, it betrays a level of capability that ought to be frightening for the operators of other anonymous Tor services. Anyone with more Tor expertise want to comment on how likely this is?

8

The Raskolnikov-ian egoists ought to read Crime and Punishment... I can fortunately say that in my experience, few programmers are assholes in person.

9

The SEC's classification of millionaires as "accredited investors" who get first crack at all the best investment opportunities is exactly the kind of "rich get richer" policy that people ought to be furious about. I think not enough people understand it.

10

#ng try to tell me what I ought to aspire to. Say I build a company to a point where I could sell for enough that I could walk away with, I don't know, let's call it $10,000,000 USD. The other option is to stay independent and maybe, maybe eventually IPO. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say "Go for the IPO, don't sell, selling is a failure".

11

If they feel bad for the environment they chose to work in and the work they chose to do, maybe they should look in the mirror and ask if they ought to reconsider their choices and do something that doesn't draw shame and contempt from the rest of the world while undermining their county's interests.

12

One can open-source his own works as a matter of commitment to the idea that all information ought to be free or for any other reason but that doesn't mean the law ought to abrogate protections for proprietary, trade secret information that most businesses need to keep confidential information as a matter of competitive advantage. If I am a broker who depends for his livelihood in serving a customer base that it took years to develop, I would be rightly upset if someone came in and simply handed all my customer information over to my competitors.

Quote examples

1

To me, that sounds like an unusually thoughtful social studies teacher. He is relating the general concepts that he is hired to teach his students to a real-world situation facing the students, and that sounds like good teaching to me. He ought to get a promotion or a raise, based only on this news about his public behavior in the classroom. It is, of course, sometimes appropriate for schools to distribute surveys to minor students in their care on which there may be questions about student behavior that may be embarrassing or illegal. But the teacher, based on the report here, is just asking his students to think about their lessons and what those lessons mean, not trying to undermine the survey process." But Dryden doesn't want this seen as him vs. the administrators. He said he knows they were acting in what they thought was the best interests of the students."

2

The thought that some politician or bureaucrat should be able to dictate serious limits on that choice is repugnant to anyone who thinks that way. And, in my view, rightly so. Unfortunately, where the old political pull persists, the law can be abused to protect old-line market players under some guise or other that is a mere pretext for guarding them from competitors who might offer something better and wind up dislodging them in a free market. Legal regulation is not to be rejected out of hand, of course. Maybe the old-line taxi services ought not to have their business cherry-picked by new market entrants who do things differently. Maybe there ought to be some limits in an urban context on absolute free space-letting if this creates nuisances or the like. The line can sometimes be tricky to draw and can require careful and fair-minded judgments given the interests at stake. But how often do we have situations where nothing of the kind happens and instead the issues are decided, in essence, by who pays off whom and who has what degree of political or bureaucratic pull that can be used to protect systems and structures that are far inferior to what the new competition might offer. I believe that, in these sorts of cases, the tech impetus will ultimately prevail and push things toward broader and freer areas of choice for consumers. Even with this rear-guard action in New Jersey, Teslas can be bought direct from the manufacturer just a short distance away or via remote ordering.

Frequently asked questions

Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.

How do you use ought in a sentence?

That's what ought to keep people awake at night.