Word.ws English Dictionary

ownself

ownself pronoun: (One's) self; used with a preceding possessive adjective to form a pronominal phrase.

Pronoun

ownself

  1. (Caribbean, Singlish, Southern US, especially, regional) (One's) self; used with a preceding possessive adjective to form a pronominal phrase.
    • You may be ashamed of your ownself, to disturb People at this Time of Night.1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volume (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: A[ndrew] Millar, […], →OCLC
    • “Tea Cake ain't been no boy for some time. He's round thirty his ownself.”1937, Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Harper, published 2013, page 3

Adverb

ownself (not comparable)

  1. (Singlish) On one's own; on one's own initiative; single-handedly.
    • You ownself go and ask her if can or not—if cannot, then bo pian lor.

Origin of ownself

From own + self.

Questions about ownself

What does ownself mean?
Ownself means (One's) self; used with a preceding possessive adjective to form a pronominal phrase.
What part of speech is ownself?
Ownself can be a pronoun or an adverb.

Words near ownself in the dictionary

  1. owning up
  2. ownings
  3. ownness
  4. owns
  5. owns up
  6. ownself
  7. ownship
  8. ownships
  9. ownsome
  10. ownsomes
  11. ownwayish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ownself (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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Cite this entry: “ownself.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ownself. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.