in time-travel contexts: another time; in or to another time
Also as n.
In standard contexts, OED records the sense ‘At some (indefinite or unknown) time; sometime or other’, with one quote from the thirteenth century and then quotes from 1833 onwards with the note ‘Common in 19th cent.’
‘But,’ said the medical man, ‘even if man in the future no longer need [sic] strength to fight against other men or beasts, he will still need a sufficient physique to resist disease.’ ‘That is the queer thing,’ said the Time Traveller; ‘there was no disease. Somewhen between now and then your sanitary science must have won the battle it is beginning now. Bacteria, or at least all disease causing bacteria, must have been exterminated. I can explain it in no other way.[’]
‘Well, Ted, at least your machine goes somewhere! This looks like a deserted part of the Jersey coast to me.’ ‘You’ll find we’ve gone somewhen as well as somewhere,’ I replied.
When he ‘landed,’ it was not in the world of the future he had visited twice before. He did not know where he was—on earth, apparently, somewhere and somewhen.
Mei-Figner’s experiment with nuclear pile 1959. Nobody knows what became of M-F. Embarrassing discovery that power source remained chronostationary; poor M-F stranded somewhen with no return power.
On Thursday you might admire a terrace house with something especially elegant decorating its balcony, and on Friday that same terrace house will exhibit a glassed-in balcony and that balcony will look as though it’s been there for years. And you’ll have the uneasy feeling that there’s something wrong somewhere, or somewhen, and then decide that your memory is playing tricks on you.
We went somewhere—somewhen, that is, for we are still here now.
If history says that a battle took place at a given location on a particular day, then I’ll be somewhere—or somewhen—far away, sitting in a tavern, drinking beer and pinching the barmaids.
Mayhew had fallen into (?), through (?) the... altar (?), plunging to... somewhere (?), somewhen (?). Clarisse, Mayhew’s wife and fellow psionicist, had followed him. [...] We had rescued them but, in the process, seemed to have dredged up the remote Past. Or had we dragged ourselves back in Time?
Everything in the world’s always moving, since the world’s part of the sky, and the sky moves all the time. When we talk about miles, what we're really talking about is hours—how long it takes to get from here to there. I think that might be why nobody can see Emmy’s House, since, even though it’s always here, Emmy can make it be here somewhen else.
‘See?’ Emma said, grinning. ‘We’re somewhen else!’ And just like that, we’d entered a loop—abandoned a mild morning in 1940 for a hot afternoon in some other, older year, though it was difficult to tell just how much older, here in the forest, away from the easily datable cues of civilization.
antedating 1894
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine serialization
Last modified 2021-11-01 14:13:16
In the compilation of some
entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
in OED.