It

How to spell it

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce it

What does it mean?

1. pronounThe neuter third-person pronoun used to refer to a thing, animal, or situation already mentioned or understood.
2. nounIn children's chasing games, the player who must catch or tag the others.

It in a sentence

• pronoun

  The parcel arrived this morning and it was heavier than expected.

• noun

  In tag the slowest runner usually ends up being it for ages.

• pronoun

  She finished the report and emailed it to her manager.

• noun

  Whoever loses the count becomes it and starts the chase.

Where does it come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This tiny word descends from the Old English hit, which was the neuter form of the third-person pronoun, standing alongside he for the masculine and heo for the feminine. The original spelling carried an initial h, and you can still hear its faint echo in casual contractions such as 'twas; over the medieval period the unstressed h was simply worn away, leaving the bare it we use today. The root belongs to the wider Germanic family, sharing ancestry with similar neuter pronouns in Dutch and German. For centuries it served only as a true pronoun, but English later pressed it into duty as a placeholder subject in phrases about weather and time, as in 'it is raining'. The spelling has stayed stubbornly simple, and the only real trap is keeping it apart from the possessive its and the contraction it's.

How the word is built

• it (single root; from Old English hit, the neuter third-person pronoun)