she
/ʃi/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 6.26 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
pron
A thing, especially a machine or other object, such as a car, a computer, or (poetically) a season.
Dated
pron
A person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant (used in a work, along with or in place of he, as an indefinite pronoun).
pron
The Catholic Church.
noun
A female.
Example Sentences
- "I asked Mary, but she said that she didn't know."
- "After the cat killed a mouse, she left it on our doorstep."
- "She seems a clever girl, your Isabel."
- "Goodly she entertaind those noble knights, / And brought them vp into her castle hall […]"
- "The mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, who at one time had been handsome, but now, asthmatic, depressed, vague, and over-feeble for her years, tried to entertain me with conversation about painting. Having heard from her daughter that I might come to Shelkovka, she had hurriedly recalled two or three of my landscapes which she had seen in exhibitions in Moscow, and now asked what I meant to express by them."
- "His family, who live in West Des Moines, Iowa, have been left “devastated,” his owner Tracy Wolfe said in GWR press release. “He was just the best giant boy,” she added."
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English sche, scho, hyo, ȝho (“she”), whence also Yorkshire dialectal shoo (“she”), Scots she, sho (“she”). Probably from Old English hēo (whence dialectal English hoo), with an irregular change in stress from hēo to heō /hjoː/, then a development from /hj-/ to /ç/ to /ʃ-/, similar to the derivation of Shetland from Old Norse Hjaltland. In this case, she is from Proto-West Germanic *hiju, from Proto-Germanic *hijō f (“this, this one”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱe-, *ḱey- (“this, here”), and is cognate with Saterland Frisian jo, ju, West Frisian hja, North Frisian jü, Danish hun, Swedish hon; more at he. A derivation from Old English sēo (“that one”, occasionally “she”) is also possible, though less likely. In that case, sēo would have undergone a change in stress from sēo to seō /sjoː/, then a change from /sj-/ to /ʃ-/, similar to the derivation of sure from Old French seur. It would then be cognate to Dutch zij and German sie. Neither etymology would be expected to yield the modern vocalism in /iː/ (the expected form would be shoo, which is in fact found dialectally). It may be due to influence from he, but both hēo and sēo also have rare variants (hīe and sīe) that may give modern English /iː/.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: sche, hēo, *hiju, *hijō, *ḱe-, ^涉
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ʃi/
- British English: /ʃiː/