thou
n.n. an old-fashioned word for 'you'. People used it long ago when talking to one person they knew well or to God.
n. the second-person singular subjective pronoun. Archaic and literary in register; historically used to denote intimacy or social inferiority, though now primarily found in religious texts and historical literature.
Thou art my best friend.
In many classic poems, the writer uses thou to speak directly to a loved one or to nature.
While modern English uses 'you' for all contexts, early modern writers used thou to signal a specific level of closeness or a lack of formal distance between speakers.
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”), 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 tu, Lithuanian tu, Old Church Slavonic тꙑ (ty), Welsh ti, Armenian դու (du), Albanian ti, Persian تو (to). 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.
From Late Middle English thouen, theu, thew, thou, thowe, thowen, thui, thuy (“to address (a person) with thou, particularly in a contemptuous or polite manner”), from the pronoun thou: see etymology 1 above.
Clipping of thou(sandth).
Clipping of thou(sand).
See though.
Functions as the subject of a sentence; typically requires verbs ending in '-est' or '-st', such as 'thou hast' or 'thou goest'.
Thou is happy.Thou art happy.Thou requires specific archaic verb conjugations, most commonly 'art' for the verb 'to be'.