The optative mood (abbreviated OPT) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the cohortative mood, and closely related to the subjunctive mood.

Ancient Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Georgian, Kurdish, Old Prussian, Sanskrit, Turkish, and Navajo are examples of languages with an optative mood.

English has no morphological optative, but there are various constructions with optative meaning. One uses the modal verb may, e.g. May you have a long life! Another uses the phrase if only with a verb in the past or past subjunctive, e.g. If only I were rich! Another uses the present subjunctive, e.g. God save the Queen!

In Romanian, the conditional and optative moods have identical forms, thus being commonly referred to as the optative-conditional mood.

The optative is one of the four original moods of Proto-Indo-European (the other three being the indicative mood, the subjunctive mood, and the imperative mood).  However, many Indo-European languages lost the optative, or renamed optative forms as subjunctive.