Optative Mood

The optative mood (abbreviated OPT) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the cohortative mood, and closely related to the subjunctive mood.

Ancient Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Georgian, Kurdish, Navajo, Old Prussian, Sanskrit, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish are examples of languages with an optative mood.

English has no morphological optative, but there are various constructions with optative meaning. One uses the modal verb may, e.g. May you have a long life! Another uses the phrase if only with a verb in the past or past subjunctive, e.g. If only I were rich! Another uses the present subjunctive, e.g. God save the Queen!

In Romanian, the conditional and optative moods have identical forms, thus being commonly referred to as the optative-conditional mood.