You've

How to spell you've

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce you've

What does you've mean?

1. verbA shortened form of 'you have', used when stating what the person addressed possesses or has done.

You've in a sentence

• You've already paid the deposit, so the room is reserved.

• By the end of this course you've learned the basics of accounting.

Where does you've come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a contraction of the two words 'you' and 'have', joined with an apostrophe that marks the dropped letters 'ha'. The pronoun 'you' descends from Old English 'eow', the object form of the second-person plural, which by the late medieval period had displaced the older singular 'thou' in polite use. The verb 'have' comes from Old English 'habban', meaning 'to hold or possess'. Written contractions like this became common in English print from the seventeenth century onward, as writers sought to capture the rhythm of natural speech on the page. The whole spelling trap lives in that small apostrophe: it must sit between 'you' and 've', and the form should never be confused with the possessive 'your'.

How the word is built

• you (pronoun)
• 've (contracted form of the verb 'have')