Translation
perhaps, possibly
Examples
veniet.
Perhaps the king will come soon.
.
Perhaps what you say is true.
credes.
Perhaps you will not believe this.
.
Perhaps few people know this.
melius fuisset tacere.
Perhaps it would have been better to keep silent.
Fortasse is an adverb, welded together out of fors and an old subjunctive, roughly "it may be that". In classical prose it takes the plain indicative: fortasse venit, "perhaps he is coming". That is worth pinning down, because its near-synonym forsitan prefers the subjunctive, and mixing the two constructions is the usual slip.
Do not confuse it with forte, which is the ablative of fors and means "by chance, as it happened". Forte reports something that did occur; fortasse hedges about something that might. The pair sit one syllable apart and translations blur them constantly. Fortasse left nothing to the Romance languages, which rebuilt "perhaps" out of per hoc and similar phrases, so it stays a reading word rather than a familiar one.
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Start your free weekThis word is part of lesson 14.