Her

How to spell her

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce her

What does her mean?

1. determinerBelonging to or associated with a female person or animal mentioned earlier.
2. pronounThe form of 'she' used as the object of a verb or preposition.

Her in a sentence

• determiner

  Her car was parked outside the office all morning.

• pronoun

  The courier handed the parcel directly to her at the front desk.

• determiner

  The manager praised her careful handling of the budget.

• pronoun

  The client met her at the conference last spring.

Where does her come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word descends directly from Old English, where 'hire' served as both the genitive ('of her') and dative ('to her') form of 'heo', the word for 'she'. It belongs to the native Germanic stock of English rather than any later borrowing, which is why it has stayed short, irregular, and resistant to tidy rules. Over the medieval centuries the spelling and pronunciation contracted from 'hire' toward the modern 'her', and the single form came to cover both the possessive use ('her book') and the object use ('I called her'). The same ancient root sits behind 'she', 'here', and the archaic 'hers'. Because it is so frequent and so short, it is almost never misspelled; the only real care is keeping it distinct from the contraction patterns of other small pronouns.

How the word is built

• her (Old English hire, genitive and dative of heo 'she')