“Mood” is a grammatical concept that is connected with verbs and statements. In English, there are five so-called moods: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, interrogative, and conditional. Grammatical mood is something that indicates a certain perspective on what is being said. It has to do with things like what is considered to be real, what one desires or recommends to become real, what would be real under a particular condition, or what one knows to be purely hypothetical or impossible. For example, verbs in the indicative mood express what is considered reality (“I listened to the song twice,” “She’s going to stop at the store on her way back.”) The indicative mood could be described as the ordinary, everyday mood expressed in most statements.
Statements in the imperative mood (e.g., “Sit here, please.” “Stop that!”) indicate that what is being said is a request; that is, a request made by the speaker to the listener or listeners. Typically, statements in the imperative mood simply imply that the subject of the verb is “you,” but occasionally, the “you” is supplied in the statement: “You get out of here right now!” “You leave me alone!” Verbs in the imperative mood use a form identical to the infinitive without the word “to.”
The conditional mood is created by the use of “would” or other modal auxiliary preceding the verb–the verb itself does not have a special form to show conditional as it often does in other languages. A typical conditional clause is in the form of “If I were you, I would tell him the truth.” The conditional mood conveys what would, could, will, or might be the case under a certain condition, e.g., “If we left now, we could get to the station just in time.”
The interrogative mood indicates that we are asking a question. It is created by simple subject-verb inversion (“Are you ready?”) or by employment of an auxiliary verb before the subject while keeping the main verb following the subject (“Do you think so?” “Have they left yet?” “Is she sleeping?”). Nowadays, we really only invert a subject and main verb when the main verb is “be” or, less often, the verb “have” (“Have you any idea what you’ve done?”). It was more common in previous centuries with verbs other than “be” or “have.” In Shakepeare’s time, one might ask: “Goest thou to the town?” “Thought he to frighten us?” “Stay you here for the night?
Verbs in the subjunctive mood indicate that the action or condition it describes is hypothetical. It is perhaps proposed or recommended but not currently real or certain, or it may be counter to reality altogether (e.g., “If I were you…”). For a more detailed summary of the subjunctive mood, please see SUBJUNCTIVE in this glossary.