This

How to spell this

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce this

What does this mean?

1. determinerUsed to identify a specific person or thing close at hand or already mentioned.

This in a sentence

• This is my favourite song.

• This recipe is from my grandmother.

Where does this come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word that goes straight back to Old English, where the neuter demonstrative was 'this' and the masculine and feminine forms were related but distinct. It belongs to a family of pointing words built on the same Germanic demonstrative stem that also gave us 'the', 'that', and 'they', all ultimately descended from a Proto-Germanic root meaning roughly 'this one here'. The word originally worked as part of a fuller grammatical system with separate genders and cases, but over the medieval centuries English shed those endings and left the plain, single form we use today. Because it is one of the oldest and most frequent words in the language, its spelling settled early and stayed simple, with no silent letters and no foreign quirks. Its closeness to 'that' reflects a deliberate ancient pairing: 'this' pointed to what was near, while 'that' pointed to what was farther off.

How the word is built

• this (single Old English root, no separable prefix or suffix)