Mood: Optative

The optative mood is generally used in the so-called "fourth-class" conditions which express a wish or desire for an action to occur in which the completion of such is doubtful. By the time of the New Testament, the optative mood was beginning to disappear from spoken and written Greek, and such rarely occurs in the New Testament.

In a few cases, verbs in the optative mood stand apart from a conditional clause to express the strongest possible wish regarding an event. The most common of these appears in the phrase "mh genoito" (MLV "Let it not happen!").

It is most often translated the same as Subjunctive; the differences in English translation are mute.