Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • pronoun Used to refer to that one previously mentioned. Used of a nonhuman entity; an animate being whose sex is unspecified, unknown, or irrelevant; a group of objects or individuals; an action; or an abstraction.
  • pronoun Used as the subject of an impersonal verb.
  • pronoun Used as an anticipatory subject or object.
  • pronoun Used as an anticipatory subject to emphasize a term that is not itself a subject.
  • pronoun Used to refer to a general condition or state of affairs.
  • pronoun Used to refer to a crucial situation or culmination.
  • pronoun Informal Used to refer to something that is the best, the most desirable, or without equal.
  • pronoun Games Used to designate a player, as in tag, who attempts to find or catch the other players.
  • noun An animal that has been neutered.
  • idiom (with it) Aware of or knowledgeable about the latest trends or developments.
  • idiom (with it) Mentally responsive and perceptive.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An abbreviation of Italy.
  • A common abbreviation of Italian.
  • A dialectal (Scotch) form of -ed, -ed.
  • A personal pronoun, of the third person and neuter gender, corresponding to the masculine he and the feminine she, and having the same plural forms, they, their, them.
  • As the nominative of an impersonal verb or verb used impersonally, when the thing for which it stands is expressed or implied by the verb itself: as, it rains (the rain rains or is falling); it is blowing (the wind is blowing).
  • As the grammatical subject of a clause of which the logical subject is a phrase or clause, generally following, and regarded as in apposition with it: as, it is said that he has won the prize; he is poor, it is true, but he is honest; it behooves you to bestir yourself; it is they that have done this mischief.
  • After an intransitive verb, used transitively for the kind of action denoted or suggested by the verb: as, to foot it all the way to town.
  • The possessive case, originally his (see he), now its; the form it without the possessive suffix having been used for a time in works written during the period of transition from the use of his to that of its.
  • In children's games, that player who is called upon to perform some particular task, as in I-spy or tag the one who must catch or touch the other players: as, he's it; who's it?

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • pronoun The neuter pronoun of the third person, corresponding to the masculine pronoun he and the feminine she, and having the same plural (they, their or theirs, them).
  • pronoun See Itself.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • pronoun The third-person singular personal pronoun used to refer to an inanimate object, to an inanimate thing with no or unknown sex or gender.
  • pronoun The third-person singular personal pronoun used to refer to an animate entity of unknown gender.
  • pronoun Used to refer to oneself when identifying oneself, often on the phone, but not limited to this situation.
  • pronoun The impersonal pronoun, used without referent as the subject of an impersonal verb or statement. (known as the dummy pronoun or weather it)
  • pronoun The impersonal pronoun, used as a placeholder for a delayed subject, or less commonly, object. (known as the dummy pronoun or, more formally in linguistics, a syntactic expletive)
  • pronoun obsolete, relative That which; what.
  • noun One who is neither a he nor a she; a creature; a dehumanized being.
  • noun The person who chases and try to catch the other players in the playground game of tag.
  • noun UK, uncountable The game of tag.
  • adjective colloquial most fashionable.
  • abbreviation language Italian.
  • abbreviation Italy.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the branch of engineering that deals with the use of computers and telecommunications to retrieve and store and transmit information

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English hit; see ko- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English, from Old English hit, from Proto-Germanic *hit (“this, this one”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱe-, *ḱey- (“this, here”). Cognate with West Frisian it ("it"), Low German it ("it"), Dutch het ("it"), German es ("it"). More at he.

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Examples

  • I have my fingers crossed that this series will continue to gain momentum and press as it progresses..it has the potential to become one great big fantastic pun intended epic fantasy.

    Quick Take: Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky Jeff C 2010

  • I've tried 321 different review formats over the last 2 3/4 years, and while it helps sometimes..it still doesn't solve the problem.

    Archive 2010-04-01 Jeff C 2010

  • By taking just an hour to create a similar “set it and forget it” plan for the rest of your finances, you can set yourself up for a lifetime of financial success while saving yourself from the unnecessary heartaches, stress, and apologies that managing money can otherwise entail.

    Five Steps For Building Wealth Automatically 2010

  • By taking just an hour to create a similar “set it and forget it” plan for the rest of your finances, you can set yourself up for a lifetime of financial success while saving yourself from the unnecessary heartaches, stress, and apologies that managing money can otherwise entail.

    Five Steps For Building Wealth Automatically 2010

  • By taking just an hour to create a similar “set it and forget it” plan for the rest of your finances, you can set yourself up for a lifetime of financial success while saving yourself from the unnecessary heartaches, stress, and apologies that managing money can otherwise entail.

    Five Steps For Building Wealth Automatically 2010

  • This concept is popular with investors who want to “set it and forget it” as well as those who want a more conservative mix in retirement.

    Bad Information Leads To Common Financial Mistakes 2010

  • “Contrary to the talk [of the law's critics], ” York declared, “it is a reasonable, limited, carefully crafted measure ... that went to great lengths to make sure it is constitutional.

    Arizona's Law: Anti-Immigrant And Anti-Constitutional 2010

  • The knife didn't fit in your hand like any knife though,  it fit like the woodworker sanded it to the lines and curves of your own palm.

    'Bout Apples Jake Hull 2010

  • 'The soundtrack in my head is Roy Orbison singing \ "It\'s over, it\'s ooooooover, \" and it doesn\'t matter that the \ "it\" for him was a love affair and not a college app.

    Karen Stabiner: The College Insider: Admissions Freak-Out Countdown #9 - The Post-App, Pre-Notification Sounds Of Silence, Unless You're A Junior. 2010

  • By taking just an hour to create a similar “set it and forget it” plan for the rest of your finances, you can set yourself up for a lifetime of financial success while saving yourself from the unnecessary heartaches, stress, and apologies that managing money can otherwise entail.

    Five Steps For Building Wealth Automatically 2010

  • It-narratives, also called “novels of circulation” or “object narratives”, are novels or stories that take an inanimate object or an animal as its narrator, endowing it with a subjectivity, though not always agency.

    How Novels Came to Be Written in the Voice of Coins, Stuffed Animals and Other Random Objects Linda Rodriguez McRobbie 2016

Comments

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  • Number 3

    (non compos mentis, got eight kids already)

    asked me when 'it' would be all right again.

    I said 'If you endeavour to avoid

    sexual intercourse for about two nights...'

    She said 'He won't wait. He will have his rights.'

    - Peter Reading, Talking Shop, from C, 1984

    July 23, 2008

  • non compos mentis?

    July 23, 2008

  • Now bracketed jenn.

    July 23, 2008

  • Weirdnet offers just the two definitions...

    July 23, 2008

  • A dynamic, indefinable quality. A certain je ne sais quoi.

    September 9, 2008

  • What Clara Bow was said to have.

    September 9, 2008

  • Possibly from the latin word 'id'?

    January 19, 2011

  • Not related to Latin id, despite the apparently obvious connexion via Grimm's Law. The Old English was hit, the h being lost in Middle English. This makes it related to he, both from a pre-Germanic *k- root (not as far as I know represented in Latin1). The neuter ending -t is however cognate with the -d of Latin id, quid, illud etc.

    1. Unless it's the deictic -c(e) of hic, sic.

    January 20, 2011

  • Thanks for that :)

    January 21, 2011

  • "it" used to be spelled "hit" (OE) but lost the h because it's so often in an unstressed place. (In reference to the list I added this to called Abbreviations that Start in the Middle.)

    March 4, 2023