usted - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

• Vd., Ud.

From vuestra merced (lit. "your mercy" (etymological) or "your grace" (idiomatic)), an honorific style.[1] 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,[2] with their reported first year of attestation:

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

Despite similar phonetics, semantics, and plausible chronology, most likely unrelated to Arabic أستاذ (ustād), which is ultimately from a different Indo-European root (via borrowing from Persian into Arabic).

• IPA(key): /usˈted/ [usˈt̪eð̞]
• Rhymes: -ed
• Syllabification: us‧ted

usted m or f by sense (plural ustedes)

1. (formal) second person formal; you (singular)
   Synonyms: tú, vos, vuestra merced, vusted, vuesarced, vuesasted, vuestra señoría
2. (Costa Rica, Colombia, chiefly Bogotá) second person informal; you (singular)

• 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 Andalusia, ustedes uses the forms associated with vosotros. See Appendix:Spanish pronouns for details. Compare Sanskrit भवत् (bhávat).

• ustedear

1. ^ de Gonge, Bob (2005), “El desarrollo de las variantes de vuestra merced a usted”, in Actas del II Congreso de la Región Noroeste de Europa de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina (ALFAL), ISSN 1139-8736
2. ^ Coromines, Joan; Pascual, José Antonio (1983), “usted”, in Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico [Critical Castilian and Hispanic etymological dictionary]‎[1] (in Spanish), volume V (Ri–X), Madrid: Gredos, →ISBN, page 844

• “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], 10 December 2024