Themselves

How to spell themselves

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce themselves

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does themselves mean?

1. pronounUsed to refer back to a plural subject that has already been named, or for emphasis on that subject.

Themselves in a sentence

• The new hires introduced themselves to the rest of the team.

• The partners decided to handle the negotiations themselves.

Where does themselves come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound reflexive pronoun built from 'them' and the plural 'selves'. The 'them' element comes from Old Norse 'theim', the dative plural of the demonstrative that Scandinavian settlers brought into northern England; it gradually displaced the older Old English 'hem' during the medieval period, which is why English uses a th- form here rather than an h- form. The 'self' part is native Old English 'self', meaning one's own person or very being, and its regular plural became 'selves' once the 'f' softened to 'v' before the plural ending, just as in 'lives' and 'wolves'. The combined form emerged in Middle English as a way to mark that the people doing an action and the people receiving it are the same. The spelling trap lives in that 'selves' ending: writers sometimes drift toward the nonstandard 'theirselves' by analogy with 'myself' and 'yourself', but standard English fixes 'them' plus 'selves' here.

How the word is built

• them (third-person plural object pronoun)
• selves (plural of self)