🙅 Refused to 🚫 Was not going to

would not

1.0

To say in the past that something will not happen later

phrasal verb
/wʊd nɑt/

: no

They promised the mistake would not happen again in the future.

Examples

He explained that the car would not start no matter what he tried.
The weather forecast said it would not rain.
She said she would not attend the meeting because of a prior commitment.
They would not finish the project on time.
She told me that she would not be able to help with the project due to her busy schedule.
He feared that they would not keep their promise to complete the work on time.
The teacher mentioned that the assignment would not be accepted after the deadline.

Surface Forms

would not infinitive

Morphology

would + not

The meaning is directly compositional: 'would' (past/conditional form of will) combined with 'not' (negation) yields the negative past/future-in-past sense. This is a grammatical, predictable combination (not an idiom) and has clear cross-linguistic parallels, so a B1 learner who knows both words will understand the MWE.

Etymology

Would not comes from using would as the past form of 'will' when people talk about the future from a past time. So when you tell a story about the past and report that something would not happen or someone refused, you use would not, which is why it shows that something 'was not expected' or 'was not promised' from that past view.