first person

American  

[furst pur-suhn] / ˈfɜrst ˈpɜr sən /

noun

1. the grammatical person used by a speaker in statements referring to the speaker's own self first person singular or to a group including the speaker first person plural.

2. a pronoun or verb form in the first person, as I or am in English, or a set of such forms.

3. a literary style in which the narrative is told from the perspective of a narrator speaking directly.

   The story is written in the first person.

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first person British  

noun

1. a grammatical category of pronouns and verbs used by the speaker to refer to or talk about himself or herself, either alone ( first person singular ) or together with others ( first person plural )

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Etymology

Origin of first person

First recorded in 1935–40

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

first person

Long before Elon Musk decided he was the first person ever to look for inefficiencies in the U.S. government, an actual department, the Government Accountability Office, was already doing that.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 8, 2026

Pike is the first person to survive after being injected with lethal doses of execution drugs, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 3, 2026

Ed Daffarn, who was the first person to warn about the dangers posed by cladding being added to Grenfell, watched the tower burn on the night of the fire.

From BBC ● Sep. 30, 2026

The competition offered a $700,000 Grand Prize to the first person who could decipher four passages containing at least 140 characters each from two Herculaneum scrolls imaged with X-ray CT.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 26, 2026

Stuart was an early riser: he was almost always the first person up in the morning.

From "Stuart Little" by E.B. White