Word.ws English Dictionary

thats

thats is the plural of that.

thats is the obsolete form of that's.

Meaning of that

Noun

that (plural thats)

  1. Something being indicated that is there; one of those.
    • As such, they do not have the ontological weight of "Being" and "Not-being," but serve simply as an explanatory vocabulary necessary to describe our world of thises and thats.1998, David L. Hall, Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han, page 247

See all 24 meanings of that

Meaning of that's

Contraction

that's

  1. (contraction) That is.
    • That's the book I've been looking for.
  2. (contraction) That has.
    • I've managed to find the solution to the problem that's been bugging me all day.
  3. (contraction, proscribed) That was.
    • Yesterday, that's bugging me all day.

See all 4 meanings of that's

Pronoun

thats

  1. (Canada, Northern Ireland, US, West-Midlands) whose, of which
    • set about to make a spoofy fantasy adventure thats focus would be on a gorgeous, blonde, man-hating super-warrior who was subservient to no one.2007, Paul Mavis, review of the 1983 film "Hundra", DVD Talk, March 25th
    • So I'm writing a paper and I'm saying, "Darfur is a region of western Sudan thats government is…" My question is about the "that"– should it be "that's" (even though that means "that is") or "thats" (with no apostrophe)?2008 September 25, jules, “That's or thats? (grammar help please!)?”, in Yahoo! Answers, archived from the original on 01 Jul 2011; quoted in Mark Liberman, “'That's'”, in Language Log, 28 March...

Forms of thats

alternative formthat's

Questions about thats

What does thats mean?
Thats means whose, of which.
What is thats the plural of?
Thats is the plural of that.
What part of speech is thats?
Thats is a pronoun.

Words near thats in the dictionary

  1. thatchwork
  2. thatchy
  3. Thathri
  4. thatness
  5. thatnesses
  6. thats
  7. thatt
  8. thatta
  9. thatta boy
  10. thattaboy
  11. thattagirl

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thats (page history and authors); that (page history and authors); that's (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: “thats.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/thats. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.