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SPANISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

usted.

second person formal; you (singular)

5 characters2 syllables approx.Español language

Meaning & usage

pron/usˈted/[usˈt̪eð̞]

  1. second person formal; you (singular)

    by-personal-gender · feminine · formal · masculine
    ¿Puedo mostrarle la sala a usted?

  2. second person informal; you (singular)

    by-personal-gender · feminine · informal · masculine

  3. you

    Andalusia · Canary-Islands · Latin-America · Western · by-personal-gender · familiar · feminine · in-plural · informal · masculine
    ¿Ustedes dos son solo amigos?
Where this word comes from

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 and Sardinian fustei. The following list has the variants reported by Coromines and Pascual, with their reported first year of attestation: Early modern variants 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 (ʔustāḏ), which is ultimately from a different Indo-European root (via borrowing from Persian into Arabic).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.