usted

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Spanish[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

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 and Sardinian bostè. The following list has the variants reported by Coromines and Pascual,[2] with their reported first year of attestation:

Pronunciation[edit]

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

Pronoun[edit]

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[edit]

  • 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).

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  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. Pascual (1983), “usted”, in Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (in Spanish), volume V (Ri–X), Madrid: Gredos, →ISBN, page 844

Further reading[edit]