/ɪt/
[pronoun] A word used to refer to a thing, animal, idea, or situation that has already been mentioned or is already known. It can also refer to a general state or condition, as in 'it is raining.'
'It' was once 'hit' — the H was not dropped by accident but slowly worn away over centuries of everyday speech.
Few words in English are older, simpler, or more quietly fascinating than 'it.' Its story begins in Proto-Germanic, the ancient ancestor language spoken across northern Europe thousands of years before English existed. Proto-Germanic had a neuter pronoun *hit, built from the root *hi-, which expressed a sense of 'this' or 'that thing nearby.' This root was shared across the Germanic family, appearing in related forms in Gothic, Old Norse, and Old High German — a sign of just how fundamental the word was to human communication.
When Germanic tribes crossed to Britain and their speech evolved into Old English, the pronoun took the form 'hit.' This was the standard neuter singular pronoun of Old English, sitting alongside 'hē' (he) and 'hēo' (she) in the same way 'it' does today. Old English was a heavily inflected language, meaning 'hit' changed its form depending on its role in a sentence, but its core shape remained recognisable. You can find it throughout the earliest English manuscripts, including the works attributed to King Alfred in the late 9th century.
The transformation from 'hit' to 'it' happened gradually during the Middle English period, roughly between the 11th and 15th centuries. The initial H was unstressed and weakly pronounced — it sat at the beginning of a small, common word that people said hundreds of times a day without thinking. Over centuries of rapid, casual speech, the H eroded and eventually disappeared entirely. This process, called 'aphesis' or initial-sound loss, is not unusual in English; the word 'apron' was once 'napron,' and 'adder' was once 'nadder,' both losing their first sounds through exactly the same process of everyday wear.
For a surprisingly long period, both forms coexisted. In early Middle English texts you can find 'hit' and 'it' used side by side, sometimes even within the same document. Regional dialects held onto 'hit' much longer than others — in some rural areas of the American South and in parts of England, 'hit' survived in spoken dialect well into the 20th century, a living fossil of the Old English original. By the time of Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century, 'it' was clearly winning, and by the era of Shakespeare in the late 16th century, 'hit' had become distinctly old-fashioned in standard English.
What makes 'it' philosophically interesting is how much weight such a tiny word carries. It is one of the most common words in English, yet its meaning is almost entirely dependent on context — it points rather than describes. Over time, 'it' also took on a special role as a so-called 'dummy subject,' filling the grammatical slot of a subject when no real noun exists: 'It is cold,' 'It seems strange,' 'It was a long time ago.' No other part of speech works quite this way. In this sense, 'it' is both the emptiest and the most essential word in the language — a pronoun that can refer to everything or to nothing, and without which English would struggle to function at all.