my
- (a form of the possessive case of I used as an attributive adjective): My soup is cold.
- Also my-my. (used as an exclamation of mild surprise or dismay): My, what a big house this is! My-my, how old he looks!
Origin of my
Usage note
I
- the nominative singular pronoun, used by a speaker in referring to himself or herself.
- (used to denote the narrator of a literary work written in the first person singular).
- Metaphysics. the ego.
Origin of I
Usage note
my-
- variant of myo- before some vowels: myalgia.
my1
- of, belonging to, or associated with the speaker or writer (me)my own ideas; do you mind my smoking?
- used in various forms of addressmy lord; my dear boy
- used in various exclamationsmy goodness!
- an exclamation of surprise, awe, etcmy, how you've grown!
Word Origin
my2
- Malaysia
MY
- motor yacht
i
I
- the ninth letter and third vowel of the modern English alphabet
- any of several speech sounds represented by this letter, in English as in bite or hit
- something shaped like an I
- (in combination)an I-beam
- dot the i's and cross the t's to pay meticulous attention to detail
i
- the imaginary number √–1Also called: j
my-
- a variant of myo-
I1
- (subjective) refers to the speaker or writer
Word Origin
I2
- chem iodine
- physics current
- physics isospin
- logic a particular affirmative categorial statement, such as some men are married, often symbolized as SiPCompare A, E, O 1
- (Roman numeral) oneSee Roman numerals
- Italy (international car registration)
Word Origin
Word Origin and History for my
pron.
c.1200, mi, reduced form of mine used before words beginning in consonants except h- (my father, but mine enemy), and from 14c. before all nouns. As interjection, by 1825, probably a shortened form of my God!
I
pron.
12c. shortening of Old English ic, first person singular nominative pronoun, from Proto-Germanic *ekan (cf. Old Frisian ik, Old Norse ek, Norwegian eg, Danish jeg, Old High German ih, German ich, Gothic ik), from PIE *eg-, nominative form of the first person singular pronoun (cf. Sanskrit aham, Hittite uk, Latin ego (source of French Je), Greek ego, Russian ja, Lithuanian aš). Reduced to i by mid-12c. in northern England, it began to be capitalized mid-13c. to mark it as a distinct word and avoid misreading in handwritten manuscripts.
The reason for writing I is ... the orthographic habit in the middle ages of using a 'long i' (that is, j or I) whenever the letter was isolated or formed the last letter of a group; the numeral 'one' was written j or I (and three iij, etc.), just as much as the pronoun. [Otto Jespersen, "Growth and Structure of the English Language," p.233]
The form ich or ik, especially before vowels, lingered in northern England until c.1400 and survived in southern dialects until 18c. The dot on the "small" letter -i- began to appear in 11c. Latin manuscripts, to distinguish the letter from the stroke of another letter (such as -m- or -n-). Originally a diacritic, it was reduced to a dot with the introduction of Roman type fonts.
My
- myopia
I
my-
- Variant ofmyo-
i
- The number whose square is equal to -1. Numbers expressed in terms of i are called imaginary or complex numbers.
I
- The symbol for electric current.
- The symbol for iodine.
Idioms and Phrases with my
i
see dot the i's and cross the t's.