it – English noun declension

English noun forms of it

Noun: it
Singularit
Pluralits

Sample Sentences

  • His master glanced up quickly, and removed the letter from his hands. "I'm surprised at you, James," he remarked severely. "A secretary should control itself. Don't forget that the perfect secretary is an it: an automatic machine—a thing incapable of feeling.…" [1920, Herman Cyril McNeile, chapter 1, in Bulldog Drummond:]
  • Too often, children become an "it" in their homes and their humanness is devalued. [1995, Neil Weiner, Sharon E. Robinson Kurpius, Shattered innocence, page 8:]
  • In the next game, Adam and Tom will be it…
  • Tag, you're it!
  • When you play hi-spy, and are “it,” and want to know where the others have hid, take a stick and put it up on end and let it fall. If it falls three times in the same direction, that shows you the way to go to find the hiders. [1896, Clifton Johnson, “Odds”, in What They Say in New England (non-fiction), Boston, Massachusetts, United States: Lee and Shepard Publishers, page 66:]
  • When there are only two children left who haven't been tagged, I will stop the game, and we will start over with those children starting as the Its. [2000, Katherine T. Thomas, Amelia M. Lee, Jerry R. Thomas, Physical education for children, page 464:]
  • Let's play it at breaktime.
  • Man, he's really got it.
  • She's the it girl, at least for this Fall.
  • Bro, that shirt is not it.
  • OMG, they were doing it in the storage room.
  • She really has it going on.
  • For Groddeck, the it is given, unknowable, and he does not try to conceptualize drives or forces. Early life and sexuality permeate […] [1988, Frederic D. Homer, The Interpretation of Illness, Purdue University Press, →ISBN, page 27:]
  • […] thus reversing the roles of the I and the it, the former now occupying the place of the latter and vice versa. An awareness of our bisubjective nature (it and me) requires thus an I as a third term that slides between […] [2015, Charis Charalampous, Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine: The Renaissance of the Body, Routledge, →ISBN, page 36:]

Etymology

1. From Middle English it, hit ( > dialectal English hit (“it”)), from Old English hit (“it”), from Proto-West Germanic *hit, from Proto-Germanic *hit (“this, this one”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱe (“here; here”).
2. Cognates
3. Cognate with Yola it, t', yt (“it”), North Frisian at, et, 't (“it”), Saterland Frisian et (“it”), West Frisian it (“it”), Dutch het (“it”), Luxembourgish hatt (“her, it, she”), Elfdalian eð (“it”); also Primitive Irish ᚕᚑᚔ (koi, “here”), Latin cis (“short of; before”), hic (“this”), Greek εκείνος (ekeínos, “that; those”). Compare Cimbrian es, is, 's, 'z (“it”), German es, 's (“it, there”), Mòcheno and Vilamovian s (“it”), Yiddish עס (es, “it”), Faroese ið (“that, which, who”), Gothic 𐌹𐍄𐌰 (ita, “it”), which instead descends from Proto-Germanic *it (“it”). More at he. See: Middle English Nouns 'it', English Nouns 'hit', Latin Nouns 'cis', German Nouns 'es'.