The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1675 quotation: “No Man will You God but will use the pronoun Thou to him.” By contrast, thou / thee were used by people of higher rank to those beneath them, and by the lower classes to each other also in elevated poetic style, in addressing God, and in talking to witches, ghosts and other supernatural beings.”

But approaches to this second person were interesting in this period of flux.ĭavid Crystal writes in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of English that by Shakespeare’s time, you “was used by people of lower rank or status to those above them (such as ordinary people to nobles, children to parents, servants to masters, nobles to the monarch), and was also the standard way for the upper classes to talk to each other. In the 1500s and 1600s, ye and then the thou / thee / thy forms, faded away, to be replaced by the all-purpose you. In early modern English, beginning in the late fifteenth century, thou, thee and thy were singular forms for the subjective, objective and possessive, and ye, you and your were plural.