thou
/ðaʊ/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.16 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To address (a person) using the pronoun thou, especially as an expression of contempt or familiarity.
Transitive verb
noun
A unit of length equal to one thousandth of an inch (25.4 µm).
adv
Misspelling of though.
conj
Misspelling of though.
Example Sentences
- "[...] Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall giue thee light."
- "Art thou in earnest about thy soul? and canst thou tell the Searcher of Hearts, Thou, O God, art the thing that I long for? Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I would love thee?"
- "Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion!"
- "Don’t thou them as thous thee! – a Yorkshire English admonition to overly familiar children"
- "Avaunt, caitiff, dost thou thou me! / I am come of good kin, I tell thee! / My mother was a lady of the stews' blood born, / And (knight of the halter) my father ware an horn; / Therefore I take it in full great scorn, / That thou shouldest thus check me."
- "[T]aunt him with the licenſe of Inke: if thou thou'ſt him some thrice, it ſhall not be amiſſe, and as many Lyes, as will lye in thy ſheete of paper, although the ſheete were bigge enough for the bedde of Ware in England, ſet 'em downe, go about it."
Etymology
From Middle English thou, tho, thogh, thoue, thouȝ, thow, thowe, tou, towe, thu, thue, thugh, tu, you (Northern England), ðhu, þeou, þeu, þou (the latter three early Southwest England), from Old English þū, from Proto-West Germanic *þū, from Proto-Germanic *þū (“you (singular), thou”), from Proto-Indo-European *túh₂ (“you, thou”). cognates and usage evolution The English word is cognate with Saterland Frisian du (“thou”), West Frisian do (“thou”), dialectal Dutch du, dou, douw (“thou”), Limburgish doe (“thou”), Low German du (“thou”), dialectal German dau (“thou”), German du (“thou”), Danish du (“thou”), Swedish du (“thou”), Norwegian Nynorsk du (“thou”), Faroese tú (“thou”), Icelandic þú (“thou”), Gothic 𐌸𐌿 (þu, “thou”), Latin tu, Ancient Greek σύ (sú) (Doric Ancient Greek τύ (tú), Greek εσύ (esý)), Irish tú, Lithuanian tu, Old Church Slavonic тꙑ (ty), Welsh ti, Armenian դու (du), Albanian ti, Persian تو (to), Gujarati તું (tũ), Hindi तू (tū). The informality of thou and its replacement by ye in formal situations date only to the 14th century and come from French influence, since French (as many European languages, but not Old English) uses the second-person plural (vous) instead of the second-person singular (tu) as a mark of politeness or respect.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: thou, þū, *þū, *túh₂, thouen
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ðaʊ/
- British English: /ðaʊ/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
holier-than-thou
how farest thou
methinks thou dost protest too much
you ally'all you guys yous
all yours y'all's you guys' your guys'
all your y'all's your all's you guys' your guys'
The following table shows a list of English personal pronoun
including archaic and dialectal forms. Dialectal and obsolete