Definition of "ought" []

• Used to indicate obligation or duty: You ought to work harder than that. (auxiliary-verb)
• Used to indicate advisability or prudence: You ought to wear a raincoat. (auxiliary-verb)
• Used to indicate desirability: You ought to have been there; it was great fun. (auxiliary-verb)
• Used to indicate probability or likelihood: She ought to finish by next week. (auxiliary-verb)
• Variant of aught1. (pronoun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The latter has been questioned on the grounds that even if it is true that ˜green™ ought to be applied this way, the ˜ought™ in question may not have anything to do with semantics but, say, with religious practices (Byrne 2002: 207)."
• "He was also the first to attempt to provide an integrated account of non-conditional and conditional ought statements, one that provided an analysis of conditional ˜ought™s via a monadic deontic operator coupled with a material conditional (reminiscent of similar failed attempts in von Wright 1951 to analyze the dyadic notion of commitment), and allowed for a form of factual detachment (more below)."
• ""My brethren, these things ought not so to be;" _ought not_ -- that is, they are unnatural."