English Conditionals: An Introduction

The English Conditional

There are a number of structures in English that are called the conditionals which are used to talk about possible or imaginary situations. A "Condition" is a "situation or circumstance".

For example: If a certain condition is true, then a particular result happens.

There are four basic conditionals that we use in English.

• Zero Conditional
• First Conditional
• Second Conditional
• Third Conditional

There are some more conditionals formed by mixing some of these four. To learn more about these, see our glossary entry: English Conditionals.

Structure of Conditional Sentences

The structure of the conditionals is straightforward. There are two basic possibilities in terms of order in the sentence:

or like this:

Notice that we only use a comma in the first example.

Conditionals: Time and Probability Table