his
UK[hɪz]US[hɪz]
det
Belonging to or associated with a male person or animal previously mentioned or easily identified.
pron
Used to refer to a thing or things belonging to or associated with a male person or animal previously mentioned.
Etymology
The word 'his' originates from the Proto-Germanic base hes, the genitive form of the third-person masculine singular pronoun he. This Proto-Germanic root can be traced further back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) demonstrative stem ko-, ke-, which also gave rise to other pronouns across Indo-European languages. In Old English, it functioned as the genitive case of 'he', meaning 'of him', and gradually solidified into its modern role as a possessive determiner and pronoun. Its journey reflects a common grammaticalization path where a case-inflected pronoun evolves into a fixed possessive marker, losing its inflectional flexibility but gaining syntactic specificity in the English language.
Analysis
The word 'his' is a simplex possessive form derived from the Old English genitive masculine and neuter singular form 'his', which is of Germanic origin.
Examples
John forgot his keys at the office.
The dog wagged his tail happily.
That book is his, not mine.