personal pronoun

[ pur-suh-nl proh-noun ]

nounGrammar.
  1. any one of the pronouns used to refer to the speaker, or to those to or about whom the speaker is speaking, as, in English, I, me, we, us, you, he, she, it, they, him, her, them.

Origin of personal pronoun

1
First recorded in 1660–70

Words Nearby personal pronoun

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use personal pronoun in a sentence

  • The relative object pronoun is often repeated as a personal pronoun, so that the verb has its object expressed twice.

    Frdric Mistral | Charles Alfred Downer
  • The third personal pronoun—he, she, it—in all its cases is especially uncertain in its references.

    English: Composition and Literature | W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
  • That is my excuse for the free use of the personal pronoun, not to make prominent the person, but to emphasize the reality.

    Silver Chimes in Syria | W. S. Nelson
  • A personal pronoun has two cases the nominative and the objective.

  • One of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred to as "Professor personal pronoun."

British Dictionary definitions for personal pronoun

personal pronoun

noun
  1. a pronoun having a definite person or thing as an antecedent and functioning grammatically in the same way as the noun that it replaces. In English, the personal pronouns include I, you, he, she, it, we, and they, and are inflected for case

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Cultural definitions for personal pronoun

personal pronoun

A pronoun that represents a person in a sentence. Personal pronouns have different forms depending on their case, gender, and number, as follows:

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.