Word.ws English Dictionary

V-form

V-form noun: a second-person pronoun used in formal situations, to address unfamiliar people and superiors.

Noun

V-form (plural V-forms)

  1. A second-person pronoun used in formal situations, to address unfamiliar people and superiors.
    • In the Erzin dialect, children address their parents with the V-form; to use the T-form would show a lack of respect for parents.2002, The Bible Translator
    • But cross-linguistically one finds that plural pronouns are predominant for the V-form. Again, there may well be a universal here that a plural address implies respect and that the singular pronoun implies a personal, i.e. intimate type of address.2003, Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker, editors, Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems

Examples of V-form in a sentence

  • Typically, the informal pronominal address term (T-form) is the original second-person pronoun (Latin tu; Germanic du) and the polite or formal V-form is a plural form.2012, Marcel Bax, Dániel Z. Kádár, Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness:
  • ... in March 2010 Ikea's Swiss website in German, French and Italian used the V-form except when addressing prospective job applicants.2014, Challenging the Monolingual Mindset:

Antonyms of V-form

Forms of V-form

pluralV-forms
alternative formV form

Origin of V-form

From the first letter of the second-person plural pronoun in Romance languages; ultimately from Latin vos.

Questions about V-form

What does V-form mean?
V-form means a second-person pronoun used in formal situations, to address unfamiliar people and superiors.
How do you use V-form in a sentence?
Typically, the informal pronominal address term (T-form) is the original second-person pronoun (Latin tu; Germanic du) and the polite or formal V-form is a plural form.
What part of speech is V-form?
V-form is a noun.
What is the plural of V-form?
The plural of V-form is V-forms.

Words near V-form in the dictionary

  1. V-E Day
  2. v-fib
  3. v-fibbed
  4. v-fibbing
  5. v-fibs
  6. V-form
  7. V-forms
  8. V-girl
  9. V-girls
  10. V-J Day
  11. v-kei

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: V-form (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: “V-form.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/v-form. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.