/hɪmˈsɛlf/
[pronoun] Used to refer back to a male person or animal already mentioned as the subject of a sentence, either to show that he did something alone or to make his identity stronger. For example, 'He made dinner himself' means no one helped him.
The 'self' in 'himself' was once a separate intensifying word meaning 'same', not a reference to personal identity at all.
The word 'himself' has roots deep in the Old English period, when the language was still being shaped by Germanic tribes who had settled in Britain. Its two components — 'him' and 'self' — were originally independent words that could stand apart from each other, and their gradual fusion into a single pronoun tells a fascinating story about how English speakers began to think about personal identity and action.
The first element, 'him', descends from Old English 'him', which was the dative and instrumental case form of the masculine pronoun 'hē' (meaning 'he'). Old English was a highly inflected language, much like Latin, meaning that pronouns and nouns changed their form depending on their grammatical role in a sentence. The dative 'him' was used when the pronoun was the indirect object of a verb — the person something was done to or for. Over centuries, as English shed most of its case endings, 'him' survived as the general objective form of 'he', the form used whenever 'he' is not the subject.
The second element, 'self', comes from Old English 'self' or 'seolf', which is closely related to Old High German 'selb', Old Norse 'sjálfr', and Gothic 'silba' — all descendants of a Proto-Germanic root *selbaz. Crucially, this word did not originally mean 'one's inner identity' or 'the soul'. It was an intensifying adjective or pronoun meaning 'same' or 'very' — used to emphasise that a particular person, and no other, was being referred to. When an Old English speaker said 'hē self', they meant something like 'he himself', with 'self' functioning almost like an exclamation mark on the pronoun.
In early Old English, the two words 'him' and 'self' appeared separately in texts, with 'self' agreeing in case and sometimes gender with the noun it emphasised. Over the Middle English period (roughly 1100–1500), these combinations began to freeze and fuse. Writers increasingly treated 'himself' as a single compound word rather than two grammatically flexible parts. This process of grammaticalisation — where separate words grow together into fixed units — is common in language history, and English reflexive pronouns like 'myself', 'yourself', 'herself', and 'themselves' all went through the same journey.
One subtle curiosity is that 'himself' is slightly irregular compared to its companions. If we followed the pattern of 'myself' (built from 'my' + 'self') or 'herself' (built from 'her' + 'self'), we might expect the form to be 'hisself', using the possessive 'his'. Indeed, 'hisself' does exist and has been used in regional English dialects for centuries, and it even appears in some literary works to represent informal or dialectal speech. But standard English settled on 'him' + 'self', preserving the old dative form rather than the possessive. This small grammatical quirk is a fossilised echo of Old English's once-complex case system, frozen in time inside an everyday word.
By the time of Middle English authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and the anonymous writer of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', 'himself' was already a stable, recognisable word. Shakespeare used it freely and naturally across all his works. Today, 'himself' serves two distinct grammatical functions: as a reflexive pronoun ('He hurt himself') and as an emphatic pronoun ('The king himself attended'). Both uses grow directly from that ancient sense of 'self' as an intensifier, a small word that once simply meant: this person, and absolutely no other.