It'll

How to spell it'll

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce it'll

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does it'll mean?

1. otherA contraction of 'it will', used to state what something is going to do or be.

It'll in a sentence

• It'll take about an hour to drive to the airport.

• If you leave the cake out, it'll go stale by morning.

Where does it'll come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction of 'it will', built from two of the oldest words in the language. The pronoun 'it' descends from Old English 'hit', the neuter form of the third-person pronoun, which gradually lost its initial 'h' in unstressed speech. 'Will' comes from the Old English verb 'willan', meaning 'to wish' or 'to want', and that older sense of desire is why 'will' still carries a flavour of intention as well as simple future time. The clipped form 'will' became ''ll' in casual speech, and writers from around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward marked the missing letters with an apostrophe. The spelling trap is purely that apostrophe: it stands in for the dropped 'wi' of 'will', so the word needs exactly one apostrophe between 'it' and 'll', never the possessive-style 'its'.

How the word is built

• it (pronoun)
• 'll (contraction of 'will', with the apostrophe marking the dropped 'wi')