/ðoʊz/
[adjective/pronoun] Used to refer to people or things that are at a distance, or that have already been mentioned. It is the plural form of 'that'.
'Those' was not the original plural of 'that' — it was borrowed from a completely different demonstrative word to fill the gap.
The word 'those' has its roots deep in Old English, but its path to becoming the plural of 'that' is surprisingly indirect. In Old English, the demonstrative pronoun 'that' had its own plural form: 'þā' (pronounced roughly like 'thaw'). This form was perfectly functional and widely used, but language, as it often does, began to shift in ways that would eventually make 'þā' seem too short and too ambiguous to survive on its own.
The story of 'those' really begins with another Old English word: 'þās', which was the plural of 'þēs', meaning 'this'. So 'þās' originally meant 'these', not 'those'. Over time, as Old English gave way to Middle English in the centuries following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the sounds of English changed dramatically. The vowel in 'þās' shifted and lengthened, and the word began to appear in texts as 'thas', 'thos', and eventually 'those'. Crucially, during this period of upheaval, the original plural of 'that' — 'þā' — began to fall out of use, leaving a gap in the language.
Middle English speakers, perhaps unconsciously, filled that gap with the evolving form of 'þās'. By a process linguists call semantic drift, 'those' migrated from meaning 'these' (the plural of 'this') to meaning the plural of 'that'. The two words — 'these' and 'those' — settled into the roles they still occupy today, neatly dividing the territory between things that are near and things that are far. It is a remarkable reshuffling of meaning, driven not by any deliberate decision but by the slow, organic pressure of everyday speech.
The 'th' sound at the beginning of 'those' connects it to a very ancient family of demonstrative words. Proto-Germanic had a root *þa-, which also gave Old English 'the', 'that', 'they', 'them', and 'their' — many of the most common words in the language. This same Proto-Germanic root traces further back to Proto-Indo-European *to-, a demonstrative base that appears across many European and Asian languages. Sanskrit 'tat' (meaning 'that') and Greek 'to' (the definite article) are distant cousins of 'those', connected across thousands of years of linguistic history.
By the time of Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century, 'tho' and 'thos' were both in use as plurals pointing to distant things. The final '-se' ending, which gives us the modern spelling 'those', became standard during the 15th century, likely influenced by the parallel form 'these', which had already settled into its modern shape. This symmetry — 'this/these', 'that/those' — feels so natural to English speakers today that it is almost impossible to imagine the centuries of change and chance that produced it.
What makes 'those' a quietly fascinating word is how ordinary it feels. It is one of the most frequently used words in English, yet almost no one would guess that it was once a completely separate word with the opposite meaning — pointing to things that are close, not far away. It is a perfect example of how languages do not plan their own logic; they patch, borrow, and repurpose, and eventually the result feels inevitable.