it
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɪt/
enpr: ĭt
ipa: /ɘt/
rhymes: -ɪt
ipa: /ɪt/
ipa: [ɪ̈t]
ipa: [ɪt]
rhymes: -ɪt
ipa: /ət/
ipa: [ɪ̈t]
ipa: [ɪ̈ʔ]
enpr: ət
ipa: /ət/
homophone: at stripped-by-parse_pron_post_template_fn stripped-by-parse_pron_post_template_fn
Forms: form: its
form: hit
form: i'
form: itt
Etymology: From Middle English it, hit ( > dialectal English hit (“it”)), from Old English hit (“it”), from Proto-West Germanic *hit, from Proto-Germanic *hit (“this, this one”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱe-, *ḱey- (“this, here”). Cognate with West Frisian it (“it”), Saterland Frisian et, 't (“it”), Dutch het (“it”), Low German it (“it”), German es (“it”). Compare also Gothic 𐌹𐍄𐌰 (ita, “it”), Latin cis (“on this”), hic (“this”). More at he.
Senses: examples: text: His master glanced up quickly, and removed the letter from his hands. "I'm surprised at you, James," he remarked severely. "A secretary should control itself. Don't forget that the perfect secretary is an it: an automatic machine—a thing incapable of feeling.…"
ref: 1920, Herman Cyril McNeile, chapter 1, in Bulldog Drummond:
text: Too often, children become an "it" in their homes and their humanness is devalued.
ref: 1995, Neil Weiner, Sharon E. Robinson Kurpius, Shattered innocence, page 8:
glosses: One who is neither a he nor a she; a creature; a dehumanized being.
examples: text: In the next game, Adam and Tom will be it…
text: Tag, you're it!
text: When you play hi-spy, and are “it,” and want to know where the others have hid, take a stick and put it up on end and let it fall. If it falls three times in the same direction, that shows you the way to go to find the hiders.
ref: 1896, Clifton Johnson, “Odds”, in What They Say in New England (non-fiction), Boston, Massachusetts, United States: Lee and Shepard Publishers, page 66:
text: When there are only two children left who haven't been tagged, I will stop the game, and we will start over with those children starting as the Its.
ref: 2000, Katherine T. Thomas, Amelia M. Lee, Jerry R. Thomas, Physical education for children, page 464:
glosses: The person who chases and tries to catch the other players in the playground game of tag.
examples: text: Let's play it at breaktime.
glosses: A game of tag.
examples: text: Man, he's really got it.
text: She's the it girl, at least for this Fall.
glosses: A desirable characteristic, as being fashionable.
examples: text: OMG, they were doing it in the storage room.
glosses: Sexual intercourse.
examples: text: She really has it going on.
glosses: Sex appeal.
examples: text: For Groddeck, the it is given, unknowable, and he does not try to conceptualize drives or forces. Early life and sexuality permeate […]
ref: 1988, Frederic D. Homer, The Interpretation of Illness, Purdue University Press, →ISBN, page 27:
glosses: Alternative letter-case form of It (“force in the vitalist approach of Georg Groddeck”).
examples: text: […] thus reversing the roles of the I and the it, the former now occupying the place of the latter and vice versa. An awareness of our bisubjective nature (it and me) requires thus an I as a third term that slides between […]
ref: 2015, Charis Charalampous, Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine: The Renaissance of the Body, Routledge, →ISBN, page 36:
glosses: Alternative letter-case form of It (“the id”).