thou

PRON · English

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Experimental coverage — measured below Partial on the number of recorded words, definitions, translations, word forms and pronunciation. Treat entries as evidence to check; meanings may be incomplete.

English is Experimental in Words. Support is measured, not declared: a language reaches Partial only when every measure meets its threshold, and a measure that has not been taken does not count. The development corpus holds 60 source-backed words in English. What is shown may be incomplete, and pronunciation audio, generated forms and generated examples are not offered.

Definition: Nominative singular of ye (“you”).

archaic · dialectal · form-of · literary · nominative · singular

No translation has been attempted for this sense.
- [...] Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall giue thee light. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Ephesians 5:14:
- 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? 1742 April 4, Charles Wesley, A Sermon Preached on Sunday, April 4, 1742. Before the University of Oxford, London: Printed by J. Paramore, […], published 1783, →OCLC, page 10:
- 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! 1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “Stave Four. The Last of the Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. […], London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 137:

No paradigm has been compiled for this word yet.

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.

No related word is recorded for this word.