usted

Spanish

Alternative forms

Vd., Ud.

Etymology

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

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

Pronoun

usted m or f by sense (plural ustedes)

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

Usage notes

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

ustedear

				nominative	dative	accusative	disjunctive
first person	singular			yo	me		mí¹
	plural	masculine²		nosotros	nos		nosotros
	plural	feminine		nosotras	nos		nosotras
second person	singular	tuteo		tú	te		ti¹
		voseo		vos	te		vos
		formal³		usted	le, se⁴	lo/la⁵	usted
	plural	familiar⁶	masculine²	vosotros	os		vosotros
		familiar⁶	feminine	vosotras	os		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
	plural	feminine		ellas	les, se⁴	las	ellas
	reflexive			—	se		sí¹

Not used with con; conmigo, contigo, and consigo are used instead, respectively
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.
Treated as if it were third-person for purposes of conjugation and reflexivity
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)
Depending on the implicit gender of the object being referred to
Used primarily in Spain
Used only in rare circumstances

References

^ 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
^ Joan Coromines, José A[ntonio] Pascual (1983) “usted”, in Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico [Critic Castilian and Hispanic Etymological Dictionary] (in Spanish), volume V (Ri–X), Madrid: Gredos, →ISBN, page 844