usted

Spanish

Alternative forms

• Vd., Ud.

Etymology

From vuestra merced (lit. "your mercy" (etymological) or "your grace" (idiomatic)), an honorific style. In 17th-century Spanish, there were a number of variants, including the intermediate forms vuesasted and vusted. Cf. Portuguese você, Galician vostede, Catalan vostè, Asturian vusté and Sardinian bostè. The following list has the variants reported by Coromines and Pascual, with their reported first year of attestation:

Early modern variants

• vuesasted, 1597
• vuasted, 1617
• vusted, 1619
• usted, 1620
• bosanzé, 1620 (Lope de Vega, Pedro Carbonero, portrayed as said by (ex-)Muslims)
• vuesarced, 1621
• voazé, 1625 (Vélez de Guevara, El Rey en su imagen, portrayed as criminal cant)
• vucé, 1626
• vuarced, ca. 1630
• boxanxé, ca. 1631 (Quevedo, Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más, portrayed as said by (ex-)Muslims)
• vuested, 1635
• voarced, 1635
• vusté (in Quiñones de Benavente, died 1651)

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /usˈted/ [usˈt̪eð̞]

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ed
• Syllabification: us‧ted

Pronoun

usted m or f by sense (plural ustedes)

1. (formal) second person formal; you (singular)
2. (Costa Rica, Colombia, chiefly Bogotá) second person informal; you (singular)

Usage notes

• Functionally, usted and ustedes are second person pronouns, but grammatically, the verbs they govern are conjugated in the third person. (This is the same distinction as seen in English with the difference between "You are welcome to stay here longer" but "Your Excellency is welcome to stay here longer.") In Andalucia, ustedes uses the forms associated with vosotros. See Appendix:Spanish pronouns for details. Compare Sanskrit भवत् (bhávat).

Derived terms

• ustedear

 

See also

Spanish personal pronouns

				nominative	dative	accusative	disjunctive
first person	singular			yo	me		mí1
	plural	masculine2		nosotros	nos		nosotros
		feminine		nosotras			nosotras
second person	singular	tuteo		tú	te		ti1
		voseo		vos			vos
		formal3		usted	le, se4	lo/la5	usted
	plural	familiar6	masculine2	vosotros	os		vosotros
			feminine	vosotras			vosotras
		formal/general3		ustedes	les, se4	los/las5	ustedes
third person	singular	masculine2		él	le, se4	lo	él
		feminine		ella		la	ella
		neuter		ello7		lo	ello
	plural	masculine2		ellos	les, se4	los	ellos
		feminine		ellas		las	ellas
	reflexive			—	se		sí1

1. Not used with con; conmigo, contigo, and consigo are used instead, respectively
2. Like other masculine Spanish words, masculine Spanish pronouns can be used when the gender of the subject is unknown or when the subject is plural and of mixed gender.
3. Treated as if it were third-person for purposes of conjugation and reflexivity
4. If le or les precedes lo, la, los, or las in a clause, it is replaced with se (e.g., Se lo dije instead of Le lo dije)
5. Depending on the implicit gender of the object being referred to
6. Used primarily in Spain
7. Used only in rare circumstances

Further reading

• “usted”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2024 December 10