thou
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From Late Middle English thouen, theu, thew, thou, thowe, thowen, thui, thuy (“to address (a person) with thou, particularly in a contemptuous or polite manner”), from the pronoun thou: see etymology 1 above.
Inflected forms:
form: thous
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: thouing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: thoued
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: thoued
pos: verb
tags: past
form: thous
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To address (a person) using the pronoun thou, especially as an expression of contempt or familiarity.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Don’t thou them as thous thee! – a Yorkshire English admonition to overly familiar children
Avaunt, caitiff, dost thou thou me! / I am come of good kin, I tell thee! / My mother was a lady of the stews' blood born, / And (knight of the halter) my father ware an horn; / Therefore I take it in full great scorn, / That thou shouldest thus check me.
[T]aunt him with the licenſe of Inke: if thou thou'ſt him some thrice, it ſhall not be amiſſe, and as many Lyes, as will lye in thy ſheete of paper, although the ſheete were bigge enough for the bedde of Ware in England, ſet 'em downe, go about it.
Attorney. [Edward Coke, Attorney General for England and Wales] All that he [Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham] did was by thy Inſtigation, thou viper; for I thou thee, thou Traitor. / Raleigh. [Walter Raleigh] It becometh not a Man of Quality and Virtue, to call me ſo: But I take comfort in it, it is all you can do.
What! doſt thou not believe that God's Thouing and Theeing was and is ſound Speech? [...] And Theeing & Thouing of one ſingle Perſon was the language of Chriſt Jeſus, and the Holy Prophets and Apoſtles both under the Diſpenſations of Law and Goſpel, [...]
The emperors before Rodolphus I. ſent all their mandates in Latin, thouing every prince, as the grammar of that language allows. This thouing of the counts of the empire was continued in the German language which diſallows ſuch expreſſions.
Unfortunate we the duennas! though we descended in a direct male-line from Hector of Troy, our mistresses will never forbear "thouing" us, were they to be made queens for it.
"One service more, Sahib, since thou hast come so opportunely," said Lalun. "Wilt thou"–it is very nice to be thou-ed by Lalun–"take this old man across the City—the troops are everywhere, and they might hurt him for he is old—to the Kumharsen Gate?["]
In Guy a duke in council thous his emperor [...] In Bevis the earl addresses the emperor of Almaine [...] while the young son of the family, Bevis, thous him not only as his father's murderer [...], but even when he is pretending friendship for him [...].
gloss: To use the word thou.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: The hardcore role-players will wake up one day feeling, like a dead weight on their chest, the strain of endless texting in Renaissance Faire English—yet dutifully go on theeing and thouing all the same.
You want to hear the word of God, and be challenged to go out and change the world. Instead, you are, for the fifth Sunday in a row, mewling on about purple-headed mountains (which is a bit of an imaginative stretch, since you live in East Anglia) and "theeing" and "thouing" all over the place.
gloss: A unit of length equal to one thousandth of an inch (25.4 µm).
pos: noun
examples: We just wanted to take off a few thou, which we easily did with fine sandpaper.
But to continue, "At Horwich they had gone all scientific, and talked in 'thous.,' though apparently some of their work was to the nearest half-inch. […]."
All these methods remove metal and can, in fact, remove a few thou from the surface. For accurately machined parts, therefore, none of these methods are suitable but wet blasting with a fine alumina which gives a polishing–cleaning action may be operated within the required tolerances.
Make no mistake, we’re talking about some major repositioning; the rear ends of the cones didn’t move just a few thou’ or even 1/4 or 1/2 inch in one direction. These beauties moved around big time.
Related words: tutoy
tutoyer
Translations: