Entitywas

Entitywas is a coined term used to denote the past state or attribute of an entity in a data model, linguistic analysis, or narrative context. It combines the word entity with was to emphasize historical status rather than a current attribute, serving as a label for previous values or conditions.

In time-aware data systems and event-sourcing paradigms, entitywas can function as a historical snapshot operator or field. It may appear as a label or predicate such as entitywas.location or entitywas.status, indicating values captured at a previous time point. In this use, entitywas helps distinguish what an entity held or experienced before a specific event or change.

In linguistics and annotation schemes, entitywas might be used to tag or annotate past-state information about an entity within corpora, simulations, or fictional worlds. It is not an established standard, and its exact semantics can vary by project, language, or data model. When applied, it typically signals a shift from a current-state descriptor to a remembered or historical value.

Examples:

- In a versioned customer record, entitywas.name = "Alex" as of 2020-05-01, while the current name is "Alexandra."

- In a historical dataset, entitywas.population = 50000 at 1980-01-01, with subsequent records showing later changes.

See also: time-aware databases, snapshotting, event sourcing, version control, historical data modeling. Since entitywas is a coined, nonstandard term, practitioners usually define its meaning and scope explicitly within their project documentation.