Skip to content
OneKitly

thou

pronounverbnounnounadverbconjunctioncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ðəʊ//
  • United States//ðaʊ//
  • United States//θaʊ//
  • United States//ðoʊ//
  • //ðaʊ//
  • //ðuː//

To address (a person) using the pronoun thou, especially as an expression of contempt or familiarity.

pronoun

  1. 1

    Also a form of yearchaicNominative singular of ye (“you”).

    [...] Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall giue thee light.

    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?

    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!

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.

verb

  1. 1

    To address (a person) using the pronoun thou, especially as an expression of contempt or familiarity.

    Don’t thou them as thous thee! – a Yorkshire English admonition to overly familiar children

    Avaunt, caitiff, dost thou thou me! / I am come of good kin, I tell thee! / My mother was a lady of the stews' blood born, / And (knight of the halter) my father ware an horn; / Therefore I take it in full great scorn, / That thou shouldest thus check me.

    [T]aunt him with the licenſe of Inke: if thou thou'ſt him some thrice, it ſhall not be amiſſe, and as many Lyes, as will lye in thy ſheete of paper, although the ſheete were bigge enough for the bedde of Ware in England, ſet 'em downe, go about it.

    Attorney. [Edward Coke, Attorney General for England and Wales] All that he [Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham] did was by thy Inſtigation, thou viper; for I thou thee, thou Traitor. / Raleigh. [Walter Raleigh] It becometh not a Man of Quality and Virtue, to call me ſo: But I take comfort in it, it is all you can do.

  2. 2

    To use the word thou.

    The hardcore role-players will wake up one day feeling, like a dead weight on their chest, the strain of endless texting in Renaissance Faire English—yet dutifully go on theeing and thouing all the same.

    You want to hear the word of God, and be challenged to go out and change the world. Instead, you are, for the fifth Sunday in a row, mewling on about purple-headed mountains (which is a bit of an imaginative stretch, since you live in East Anglia) and "theeing" and "thouing" all over the place.

Etymology

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.

noun

  1. 1

    A unit of length equal to one thousandth of an inch (25.4 µm).

    We just wanted to take off a few thou, which we easily did with fine sandpaper.

    But to continue, "At Horwich they had gone all scientific, and talked in 'thous.,' though apparently some of their work was to the nearest half-inch. […]."

    All these methods remove metal and can, in fact, remove a few thou from the surface. For accurately machined parts, therefore, none of these methods are suitable but wet blasting with a fine alumina which gives a polishing–cleaning action may be operated within the required tolerances.

    Make no mistake, we’re talking about some major repositioning; the rear ends of the cones didn’t move just a few thou’ or even 1/4 or 1/2 inch in one direction. These beauties moved around big time.

Etymology

Clipping of thou(sandth).

noun

  1. 1

    slangA thousand, especially a thousand of some currency (dollars, pounds sterling, etc.).

    Whoa there, big spender — that'll cost you a few thou. Are you sure you can afford it?

    Butch [Cassidy] gave him 3 thous in cash 1 thous for the lawyer another thous if the lawyer wins & 1 thous for Tom O'Day.

    He has a few thou in the account, enough to make your everyday living expenses, not enough to keep current with the bigger bills.

    Well, we'll need a few thou, Carlos. Got to get together a few thou first. For rent, you know. Rent and making contacts with artists, all that.

Etymology

Clipping of thou(sand).

adverb

  1. 1

    Variant of thoughMisspelling of though.

Etymology

See though.

conjunction

  1. 1

    Variant of thoughMisspelling of though.

Forms

plural
ye, thous
past tense
thoued
past participle
thoued
present participle
thouing
third person singular
thous
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).