Them

Part of speech: pronoun

Pronunciation: /ˈðɛm/

Definitions

1. Referring to previously mentioned people or things, this term indicates distinct individuals or groups
2. It serves to denote objects or entities apart from the speaker's perspective
3. Used to indicate multiple people or objects as the object of a verb or preposition in a sentence

Etymology: The pronoun "them" is one of the most ordinary words in English, yet it arrived by way of a Viking invasion. Old English had no word for it at all; the language used forms of "hie" (the plural of "he") for "they" and "hem" for the object. The form "them" was borrowed from Old Norse "þeim", the dative plural of the Norse demonstrative "sá" (that), which was spoken by the Scandinavian settlers in northern and eastern England. Over the Middle English period it displaced the native object form, so "them" replaced "hem" and became the standard object pronoun. The Old Norse "þeim" is itself a relative of the Proto-Germanic "*þaimaz", which belongs to the same family of words as "the" and "that". English thus borrowed a plural pronoun from neighbours whose language shared its deepest grammatical roots, which made the swap easy: the two languages already used very similar sounds for the same kinds of words.

Synonyms: those, these