Word.ws English Dictionary

generic you

generic you noun: the pronoun you, used to refer to an unspecified person or to people in general.

Noun

generic you

  1. The pronoun you, used to refer to an unspecified person or to people in general.
    • The generic you can include more than just the direct addressee of the speech — it can even include those who are only over-hearing (or ‘over-reading’), suggesting that the reader could feel like they are also addressed by the pronoun.2015, Zsófia Demjén, Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and the Experience of Depression, page 161
    Synonyms:
    one, they

Synonyms of generic you

Questions about generic you

What does generic you mean?
Generic you means the pronoun you, used to refer to an unspecified person or to people in general.
What part of speech is generic you?
Generic you is a noun.

Words near generic you in the dictionary

  1. generic they
  2. generic top-level domain
  3. generic top-level domains
  4. generic type
  5. generic types
  6. generic you
  7. Generica
  8. generical
  9. generically
  10. genericalness
  11. generich

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: generic you (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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