Wiktionary
vb. (past participle of be a thing English)
Usage examples of "been a thing".
Hunger in the past had always been a thing to fear, and his habitual reaction made it hard to concentrate his perceptions on sensing the enemy.
The harp was aged, although it had once been a thing of shining beauty.
When the old priest was born, the greatness of America must have been a thing of such recent memory that few can have realized it had passed forever.
If I had been a creature from around Proxima Centauri, the old Man and the beard might have been a Thing with eight tentacles and faceted eyes.
But she didn't let out a peep about it, or let on like there'd been a thing out of the way.
On Vilwan he had been a thing to be trained, a weapon to be honed though exactly for what purpose no one ever bothered to tell him.
Thus I learned that the local economy was underpinned by the Dounreay nuclear reactor down the road, that the castle had once been a thing of well-maintained beauty but had been allowed to fall into decrepitude by an eccentric owner, that Inverness was the seat of all forms of excitement.
But there had been a thing deep in Foreman's eyes, and another thing deeper, and a third thing deeper still.