/ðiːz/
[adjective] Used to point to specific people or things that are near the speaker or that have just been mentioned. It is the plural form of 'this'.
The word 'these' descends from a prehistoric Germanic pointing gesture frozen into language over a thousand years ago.
The word 'these' reaches back to Old English, where it existed in the form 'þās' — the thorn symbol 'þ' representing the 'th' sound we still use today. Old English was a richly inflected language, meaning that words changed their endings depending on how they were used in a sentence, and 'þās' was the nominative and accusative plural form of the demonstrative pronoun system built around 'þes' (masculine), 'þēos' (feminine), and 'þis' (neuter). These words all pointed at something close at hand, functioning much like a finger extended toward a nearby object.
The roots go deeper still, into Proto-Germanic, the ancient ancestor language that gave rise to English, German, Dutch, and the other Germanic tongues. Proto-Germanic had a demonstrative root *þa- combined with a suffix *-si, creating a form meaning roughly 'this one here.' This same root is visible in Old High German 'dese' and Old Saxon 'these,' showing that related tribes across northern Europe were using strikingly similar pointing words at the same time. The shared origin reveals that the human need to say 'this, right here, nearby' is ancient and universal among Germanic peoples.
The shift from Old English 'þās' to Middle English 'these' happened gradually between the 11th and 14th centuries, as the language underwent enormous changes following the Norman Conquest of 1066. French became the language of power and administration in England, and English absorbed thousands of French and Latin words. However, the most basic, everyday words — the ones used to point, to name family members, to describe simple actions — tended to survive almost unchanged. 'These' was too fundamental to be replaced. It simply adapted its spelling as English writing conventions evolved.
One of the most fascinating aspects of 'these' is what it reveals about how language encodes space and distance. English divides the pointing world into two zones: 'near' (this, these) and 'far' (that, those). Many languages divide space into three zones — near the speaker, near the listener, and far from both — but English collapsed this into a simpler two-way system during the Middle English period. The Old English system was actually more complex, distinguishing gender and grammatical case, but over centuries English speakers steadily smoothed away these distinctions, keeping only the near-versus-far contrast that we use today.
The relationship between 'these' and its companion words is a family portrait of the English demonstrative system. 'This' and 'these' form one pair (near), while 'that' and 'those' form another (far). Both pairs trace back to that same Proto-Germanic root *þa-, making them true cousins. Across the Atlantic, some regional American dialects developed the form 'these here' for extra emphasis — a construction that grammarians sometimes called redundant but which speakers found powerfully clarifying. This pattern of doubling up demonstratives for emphasis appears in many dialects around the world, showing that 'these' by itself sometimes feels like it needs a little help to do its pointing job.