- 1汝、爾（古英文的「你」，受詞用法）。今日只出現在聖經、莎士比亞、婚禮誓詞與聖歌裡；有趣的是它原本是對熟人用的親近說法，相當於「你」而非「您」。
Thee is the very old word for 'you' when 'you' is the object of the sentence — the person receiving the action. Old English had a full set: thou for the subject (thou art kind), thee for the object (I give thee this ring), thy and thine for possession. So thou is to thee exactly as I is to me, and he is to him.
Nobody speaks this way now. It died out of ordinary English around four hundred years ago, and modern English uses 'you' for everything. But you still meet thee constantly in three places: the King James Bible and old prayers, Shakespeare and other old plays, and wedding vows and hymns. Because of that, the word now feels holy, poetic, or old-fashioned rather than simply .
One thing that surprises people: thou and thee were originally the *casual* forms, used for close friends, children, and God, while 'you' was the polite form for strangers and superiors — much like 你 and 您. It was the loss of the casual form that flipped the feeling, so today thee sounds grand and formal, which is the opposite of what it once meant. Old communities in England and America kept using thee into modern times as a mark of plain, equal speech, and a few dialects in northern England still have it.
From the word’s history
From Middle English þe, from Old English þē, objective case of thou.
源自古英文 þē，是 thou「你」的受格。
組成From Middle English þe, from Old English þē, from Proto-Germanic *þiz, from the Proto-Indo-European root *te for the second-person singular. Its relatives survive across the Germanic languages: German dir, Icelandic þér, West Frisian dy.
原始詞典資料8 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
theepron詞源 1/ðiː/
- 1
archaicliteraryObjective and reflexive case of thou.
- Prince Henry: Did I ever call for thee to pay thy part? Falstaff: No; I'll give thee thy due, thou hast paid all there.
- Michael, this my behest have thou in charge, Take to thee from among the Cherubim Thy choice of flaming Warriours, least the Fiend
- 2
archaicdialectalThou.
- [H]e immediately perceived when I was taken ill, and, after seeing Mama, said to me "I am afraid Thee art not well thyself?"
- "He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship." "Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone
theeverb詞源 1/ðiː/
- 1
To address (a person) using the pronoun thee.
- What! doſt thou not believe that God's Thouing and theeing was and is ſound Speech? [...] And theeing & Thouing of one ſingle Perſon was the language of Chriſt Jeſus, and the Holy Prophets and Apoſtles both under the Diſpenſations of Law and Goſpel, [...]
- 2
To use the word thee.
- The hardcore role-players will wake up one day feeling, like a dead weight on their chest, the strain of endless texting in Renaissance Faire English—yet dutifully go on theeing and thouing all the same.
- You want to hear the word of God, and be challenged to go out and change the world. Instead, you are, for the fifth Sunday in a row, mewling on about purple-headed mountains (which is a bit of an imaginative stretch, since you live in East Anglia) and "theeing" and "thouing" all over the place.
theeverb詞源 2/θiː/
- 1
obsoleteTo thrive; prosper.
- Well mote thee, as well can wish your thought.
theenoun詞源 3
- 1
The letter ⟨(⟩, which stands for the th sound /ð/ in Pitman shorthand.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。