our
det.belonging to us. You use this word to show that something is owned or shared by you and at least one other person.
det.belonging to or associated with the speaker and one or more other people. Functions as a possessive determiner that must be followed by a noun.
“We love our new house.”
“Our flight leaves at six in the morning, so we need to go to bed early tonight.”
“While individual goals are important, our collective success depends on how well we communicate and support each other during the most difficult phases of the project.”
A possessive determiner; it must precede a noun or an adjective-noun phrase.
Learners often confuse the determiner 'our' with the possessive pronoun 'ours'. 'Our' requires a following noun.
From Middle English oure, from Old English ūre, ūser (“our”), from Proto-Germanic unseraz (“of us, our”), from Proto-Indo-European n̥-s-ero- (“our”). Cognate with Scots oor (“our”), West Frisian ús (“our”), Low German uns (“our”), Dutch onze (“our”), German unser, unsere (“our”) Danish vor (“our”), Norwegian vår (“our”), and more distantly Latin noster.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
For Mandarin speakers Mandarin does not distinguish between possessive adjectives like 'our' and possessive pronouns like 'ours', using the single particle 的 (de) for both. Learners often produce 'This is our' instead of 'This is ours' or use 'ours' before a noun as a result of this unified structure.
For Japanese speakers Japanese speakers may neutralize the distinction between /aʊə/ and /aʊər/ due to the lack of rhoticity in Japanese and the tendency to map 'our' onto the vowel-heavy 'a-wa-a' /aɰaa/ structure, often dropping the final /r/ or lengthening the final vowel instead.
Japanese marks possession through the particle 'no' attached to pronouns like 'watashitachi no' (our). Because Japanese does not distinguish between possessive determiners and possessive pronouns, learners often substitute 'our' with 'ours' or fail to distinguish the two in attributive positions.