Thou, thee, thy, and thine are old forms of you and your for one person. Thou is the subject ("thou art"), thee is the object ("I see thee"), thy means your before a consonant, and thine means your before a vowel or yours on its own.
You still meet these words in Shakespeare, in older translations of the Bible, in poems and prayers, and in jokes that make someone sound grand and old-fashioned. Here is how to use them correctly, and where they come from.
Where do they come from, and what are they?
They are native English words. Thou goes back to Old English, the English spoken from about the 5th to the 11th century, and it is related to German du and Latin tu. By Shakespeare's time, around 1600, you had become the usual, polite form. Thou was kept for family, close friends, children, and people of lower rank, or for an insult. It disappeared from everyday standard English in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it lives on in some dialects of northern England.
All four words are personal pronouns: they stand for the person you are talking about. They are all in the second person, the person you speak to, which today is plain and simple you or your. And they are singular: for more than one person, English used ye as the subject and you as the object.
| Old form | Today | Use |
|---|---|---|
| thou | you | subject |
| thee | you | object |
| thy | your | before a consonant |
| thine | your, yours | before a vowel, or on its own |
Thou and thee
Thou means you. It is the nominative case of the pronoun, the subject form.
Example: "Art thou surprised that I love pugs?"
Thee also means you. It is the objective case, the form used for the object of a verb or a preposition.
Example: "My pug and I long to meet thee."
Verbs that go with thou take their own endings, usually -est or -st: thou art (you are), thou hast (you have), thou knowest (you know), thou canst (you can).
Thy and thine
Thy and thine both mean your: they express possession.
Thy is used before words that start with a consonant sound, and thine before words that start with a vowel sound, just as a and an are.
Example: "Thy pug is of respectable size."
Example: "Thine eyes almost sparkle as much as my pug's."
Thine can also stand on its own, without a noun, where today you would say yours: "The pug is thine." It works like mine next to my.
For the pronouns English uses today, see what you need to know about pronouns and possessive adjectives and pronouns.