Hers

How to spell hers

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hers

What does hers mean?

1. pronounUsed to refer to a thing or things belonging to or associated with a female person previously mentioned.

Hers in a sentence

• The blue umbrella by the door is hers.

• My desk faces the window, but hers is near the printer.

Where does hers come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English possessive 'hire', the genitive form of 'heo', meaning 'she'. During the Middle English period an extra 's' was tacked on by analogy with other possessive pronouns such as 'ours', 'yours' and 'theirs', producing the modern 'hers'. Crucially, this is an absolute possessive pronoun, not a contraction and not a regular noun made possessive, so it never takes an apostrophe; the spelling 'her's' has never been correct. The same pattern explains why 'yours', 'ours' and 'theirs' are all written without apostrophes, since they descend from the same family of pronoun forms. Remembering that 'hers' belongs with that apostrophe-free group is the surest way to avoid the most common slip.

How the word is built

• her (possessive of 'she')
• -s (possessive ending, no apostrophe)