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OneKitly

herself

pronouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//hɜːˈsɛlf//
  • United Kingdom//(h)əsɛlf//
  • United States//hɝˈsɛlf//
  • //æˈsɛl//
  • //ɐˈsɛl//

Her; the female object of a verb or preposition that also appears as the subject.

pronoun

  1. 1

    Her; the female object of a verb or preposition that also appears as the subject.

    She injured herself.

    This time was most dreadful for Lilian. Thrown on her own resources and almost penniless, she maintained herself and paid the rent of a wretched room near the hospital by working as a charwoman, sempstress, anything. In a moment she had dropped to the level of a casual labourer.

    Lizzo, who is known for messages of self-love and wider acceptance, has recently said as much as she shared that she is encouraging a stance of body neutrality for herself and others.

  2. 2

    She; an intensifier of the female subject or object, often used to indicate the directness or exclusiveness of that person .

    She was injured herself.

  3. 3

    The subject or non-reflexive object of a predicate; she (used of upper-class ladies, or sarcastically, of women who imagine themselves to be more important than others)

    What's herself up to this time?

    Have you seen herself yet this morning?

    Was anyone hurted? Sure, they were just trailin' theirselves off the ground. Ye wud have died larfin'. There's Jimmy Hanlon was never his own man since, and I had me nose broke on me—I find it yet—and some says there was a wee girl from Tanderagee got herself killed.

Etymology

From Middle English. Equivalent to her + -self.

Forms

plural
themselves
singular
themself, themselves
masculine
himself
neuter
itself
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).