never thought I'd see you here
- idiom
- Informal
:
nunca pensé que te vería aquí
- I never thought I'd see you here at the concert!
Examples
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She walked into the meeting and said, "Never thought I'd see you here, Mark."
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After so many years apart, I never thought I'd see you here at this reunion.
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Never thought I'd see you here—I had no idea you even liked this restaurant!
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When I spotted Sarah, I never thought I'd see you here.
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Never thought I'd see you here! I didn’t expect to run into you at the park.
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At the airport, I never thought I'd see you here after all these years!
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When I bumped into my old friend at the grocery store, I said, "Never thought I'd see you here."
Synonyms
8
2.6
Words people say when they are surprised to see something
To show you are surprised something happened
Surface Forms
Morphology
never + think + I'd + see + you + here
The overall meaning — surprise at encountering someone in this place — is directly built from the constituents: 'never' (not ever) + 'thought' (expect) + 'I'd see you here' (I would/ I had see you here), so a learner who knows the words can infer unexpectedness. The contraction 'I'd' is common and contextually recoverable, and many languages use the same expectancy/negation pattern, making the expression immediately comprehensible to B1 learners.
Etymology
Never thought I'd see you here comes from the simple image of suddenly seeing someone here where you did not expect them. That's why people use it to mean 'I'm surprised to meet you here'.