usted

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Spanish

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From vuestra merced (lit. "your mercy" (etymological) or "your grace" (idiomatic)), an honorific style.[1] In 17th-century Spanish, there were a number of variants, including the intermediate forms vuesasted and vusted. Cf. Portuguese você, Galician vostede, Catalan vostè, Asturian vusté and Sardinian bostè. The following list has the variants reported by Coromines and Pascual,[2] with their reported first year of attestation:

Early modern variants
  • vuesasted, 1597
  • vuasted, 1617
  • vusted, 1619
  • usted, 1620
  • bosanzé, 1620 (Lope de Vega, Pedro Carbonero, portrayed as said by (ex-)Muslims)
  • vuesarced, 1621
  • voazé, 1625 (Vélez de Guevara, El Rey en su imagen, portrayed as criminal cant)
  • vucé, 1626
  • vuarced, ca. 1630
  • boxanxé, ca. 1631 (Quevedo, Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más, portrayed as said by (ex-)Muslims)
  • vuested, 1635
  • voarced, 1635
  • vusté (in Quiñones de Benavente, died 1651)

Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /usˈted/ [usˈt̪eð̞]
  • Audio:(file)
  • Rhymes: -ed
  • Syllabification: us‧ted

Pronoun

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usted m or f by sense (plural ustedes)

  1. (formal) second person formal; you (singular)
  2. (Costa Rica, Colombia, chiefly Bogotá) second person informal; you (singular)

Usage notes

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  • Functionally, usted and ustedes are second person pronouns, but grammatically, the verbs they govern are conjugated in the third person. (This is the same distinction as seen in English with the difference between "You are welcome to stay here longer" but "Your Excellency is welcome to stay here longer.") In Andalucia, ustedes uses the forms associated with vosotros. See Appendix:Spanish pronouns for details. Compare Sanskrit भवत् (bhávat).

Derived terms

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See also

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Spanish personal pronouns
nominative dative accusative disjunctive
first person singular yo me mí1
plural masculine2 nosotros nos nosotros
feminine nosotras nosotras
second person singular tuteo tú te ti1
voseo vos vos
formal3 usted le, se4 lo/la5 usted
plural familiar6 masculine2 vosotros os vosotros
feminine vosotras vosotras
formal/general3 ustedes les, se4 los/las5 ustedes
third person singular masculine2 él le, se4 lo él
feminine ella la ella
neuter ello7 lo ello
plural masculine2 ellos les, se4 los ellos
feminine ellas las ellas
reflexive — se sí1
  1. Not used with con; conmigo, contigo, and consigo are used instead, respectively
  2. Like other masculine Spanish words, masculine Spanish pronouns can be used when the gender of the subject is unknown or when the subject is plural and of mixed gender.
  3. Treated as if it were third-person for purposes of conjugation and reflexivity
  4. If le or les precedes lo, la, los, or las in a clause, it is replaced with se (e.g., Se lo dije instead of Le lo dije)
  5. Depending on the implicit gender of the object being referred to
  6. Used primarily in Spain
  7. Used only in rare circumstances

References

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  1. ^ de Gonge, Bob (2005) “El desarrollo de las variantes de vuestra merced a usted”, in Actas del II Congreso de la Región Noroeste de Europa de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina (ALFAL), ISSN 1139-8736
  2. ^ Joan Coromines, José A[ntonio] Pascual (1983) “usted”, in Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (in Spanish), volume V (Ri–X), Madrid: Gredos, →ISBN, page 844

Further reading

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