Synonyms

wait and see

Idioms

Bide one's time for events to run their course, as in Do you think they'll raise taxes?—We'll have to wait and see. This expression was first recorded in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719): “We had no remedy but to wait and see.” In Britain the phrase became associated with Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, who in 1910 so often said it to the opposition regarding an impending bill that he became known as “Old Wait and See.”

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

“You just wait and see. By tomorrow night, I’ll have a sack full of them; and one of them will be that hundred dollar monkey. He’s the jasper I’ll be looking for.”

From Literature

Grandpa laughed and said, “I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see. Now that we’ve got everything figured out, maybe you’d better be high-tailing it for home. And, if this doesn’t work out, I wouldn’t let it bother me. Just remember there never was an animal that couldn’t be caught.”

From Literature

“You just wait and see,” I said.

From Literature

“Well,” Papa said, “it looks like we’ve done about all we can here, and there’s a lot of work to be done. All we can do now is wait and see if our wishes come true.”

From Literature

“The strategy is: wait and see, and maintain daily business,” Dudenhoeffer said.

From The Wall Street Journal

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023