ye

/(j)iː/UK/jiː/

ye pronoun: you (the people being addressed).

Pronoun

ye (personal pronoun)

(Cornwall, Ireland, Newfoundland, personal, pronoun, archaic outside Northern England) You (the people being addressed).
- My liefe (ſayd ſhe) ye know, that long ygo, / Whileſt ye in durance dwelt, ye to me gaue / A little mayde, the which ye chylded tho ; / The ſame againe if now ye liſt to haue, / The ſame is yonder Lady, whom high God did ſaue.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], part II (books IV–VI), London: […] [Richard Field] for William Ponsonby, →OCLC, stanza 17, page 512
- Queſtion me then no more; whate'er ye want, / Ask in my Name, and God ſhall ſurely grant. / You've asked nothing yet for Jesus sake : / Ask and receive, and of my joyes partake.1671, Elisha Coles, chapter 6, in ΧΡΙΣΤΟΛΟΓΙΑ: Or, a Metrical Paraphraſe on the Hiſtory of Our Lord and Saviour Jeſus Chriſt : Dedicated to His Univerſal Church
(archaic, personal, pronoun) You (the singular person being addressed).
- Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; [...]1851, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 23
- Maybe they'd get hurted!" said the boys. "Hurted, how-are-ye!" says Hughie; "How could anyone get hurted so simple as that? I'd be the last in the world to speak of such a thing in that case! But if yous are afraid of doing it..."1915, Charles L Graves, Humours of Irish life, page 255

Article

(archaic, definite) The.
- Ye Olde Medicine Shoppe
- Now vnto yͤ king eternal, immortall, inuiſible, the onely wiſe God, be honour and glory for euer ⁊ euer. Amen.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 1 Timothy 1:17, column 2

Interjection

IPA/jə/

(slang) Yes, yeah.

Noun

ye (plural yes)

The Cyrillic letter Е, е, featured in various Slavic and Turkic languages.

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Ye

Ye (plural Yes)

A surname from Chinese.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Ye

IPA/jeɪ/

(slang) Kanye West, American rapper, songwriter, record producer, and fashion designer.
- “‘Crazy’ is a word that’s not gonna be used loosely in the future,” Ye said.2022 February 11, Peony Hirwani, “Kanye West tells fan who suggested he’s off medication to ‘be more conscious’”, in The Independent, archived from the original on 22 Aug 2025

Proper noun (3) capitalized: YE

(abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Young Earth, a form of creationism which proposes that the Earth is no more than a few thousand years old.

Examples of ye in a sentence

There's Jimmy Hanlon was never his own man since, and I had me nose broke on me—I find it yet—and some says there was a wee girl from Tanderagee got herself killed.1915, Charles L Graves, Humours of Irish life, pages 241-242:
Know Ye that We have declared and by these Presents do declare our Will and Pleasure as follows—[…]1995, Elizabeth II, “Legal Notice 247 of 1996”, in Hong Kong Government Gazette, page B1096:

All 40 example sentences with ye

Synonyms of ye

y'all

Forms of ye

Pronoun
alternative form	yee
Article
alternative form	yͤ
Noun
plural	yes
Proper noun
plural	Yes

Origin of ye

From Middle English ye, ȝe, from Old English ġē (“ye”), the nominative case of the second-person plural personal pronoun, from Proto-West Germanic *jiʀ, from Proto-Germanic *jīz, a North-West variant of Proto-Germanic *jūz (“ye”), from Proto-Indo-European *yúHs (“ye”), plural of *túh₂. Cognate with Scots ye (“ye”), Saterland Frisian jie, Dutch gij, ge, jij, je (“ye”), Low German ji, jie (“ye”), German ihr (“ye”), Danish and Swedish I (“ye”), Icelandic ér (“ye”), Latvian jūs (“ye”), Sanskrit यूयम् (yūyám, “ye”). See also you.

From Middle English þe. Early press typographies in late 15th century lacked the letter þ (“thorn”), for which the letter y was substituted due to their resemblance in blackletter hand (etymological y was for a while distinguished by a dot, ẏ (14th c.–15th c.)). Short form yͤ continued long after the digraph th had replaced þ elsewhere. "Ye" for "þe" continued in manuscripts through the 18th century. The practice was revived in the United Kingdom in the 19th century as a deliberate antiquarianism in shop names, thus the Ye Olde ... Shoppe construction.

Shortened from yes or yeah.

Phrases with ye

Words that rhyme with ye

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about ye

What does ye mean?: Ye means you (the people being addressed).
How do you use ye in a sentence?: There's Jimmy Hanlon was never his own man since, and I had me nose broke on me—I find it yet—and some says there was a wee girl from Tanderagee got herself killed.
What part of speech is ye?: Ye can be a pronoun, an article, an interjection or a noun.
How do you pronounce ye?: Ye is pronounced /jiː/ (UK).

Words near ye in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: ye (page history and authors); Ye (page history and authors); YE (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-ye.ogg.

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