Perchance means possibly or maybe, but it's an old-fashioned way of saying it that you'll mostly find in older books, poems, and plays. When Shakespeare wrote “To sleep, perchance to dream,” he meant “to sleep, and maybe to dream.”

The word has a thoughtful, wondering quality to it. While maybe is casual and everyday, perchance sounds more formal and literary. You might say “maybe we'll see a shooting star tonight,” but a character in a classic story might say “perchance we shall witness a falling star this eve.”

Today, people rarely use perchance in normal conversation. If you did, it would sound deliberately fancy or like you're playfully imitating old-fashioned speech. But when you're reading classic literature or poetry, you'll encounter it. Understanding that it simply means “maybe” or “perhaps” helps those older sentences make sense. Writers from centuries past used perchance the way we use perhaps today: to express possibility or uncertainty about something that might happen.