/juː/
[pronoun] Used to refer to the person or people that you are speaking or writing to. It can refer to one person or more than one person.
'You' was originally only plural — English once had a completely different word for just one person.
The word 'you' has a surprisingly complicated history, because it was not always the simple, all-purpose word it is today. In Old English, the language spoken in England roughly between 450 and 1150 CE, there was a full system of second-person pronouns that carefully separated singular from plural. To address a single person, speakers used 'þū' (pronounced roughly like 'thoo'). To address more than one person, they used a different set of forms: 'gē' for the subject form (as in 'you are coming'), 'ēow' for the object form (as in 'I see you'), and 'ēower' for the possessive (as in 'your home'). The modern word 'you' descends directly from that Old English object form 'ēow', which over several centuries shifted in pronunciation and spelling toward the form we use today.
The really dramatic change came during the Middle English period, roughly 1150 to 1500. At this time, English social culture was deeply influenced by French courtesy conventions, particularly the habit of using a plural form to address a single person of higher status — a show of respect. This is the same idea found in French 'vous' (the formal 'you') versus 'tu' (the informal singular). In English, the plural forms — 'ye', 'you', and 'your' — began to be used when speaking to nobles, elders, or anyone deserving of deference. Meanwhile, 'thou', 'thee', and 'thy' remained the forms used for close friends, children, and social inferiors.
Over the following centuries, the polite plural forms spread further and further. Using 'thou' came to feel rude or overly familiar, while 'you' felt appropriately respectful. By the 17th century, 'you' had essentially taken over for both singular and plural in standard English, and 'thou' had all but disappeared from everyday speech. This is why the King James Bible of 1611, which was already slightly old-fashioned at the time it was written, still uses 'thou' extensively — it was preserving the older, more intimate register for prayers addressed directly to God.
The collapse of the singular-plural distinction created a gap in the language that speakers have been trying to fill ever since. When English lost 'thou', it lost its grammatical way of telling one person apart from many. Regional dialects quickly invented solutions: the American South developed 'y'all' (you all), parts of the northeastern United States use 'youse', Irish and some British dialects use 'youse' or 'ye', and many American dialects use 'you guys'. None of these has become fully standard in formal writing, leaving 'you' to do double duty — a quirk that causes genuine confusion even for native speakers.
Interestingly, the possessive forms 'your' and 'yours' also descend from the Old English plural system — from 'ēower' — and 'yourself' and 'yourselves' followed naturally as reflexive forms built on top of 'your'. Even 'ye', the subject plural of Old English, survived long enough to appear on old shop signs and pub names like 'Ye Olde Tavern', though by that point the letter 'y' was simply being used to represent the Old English letter thorn (þ), which looked like a 'y' in certain handwritten scripts. So 'Ye Olde' was never meant to be pronounced 'yee' — it was always meant to sound like 'the'. This small fact is one of the most persistent misreadings in the history of the English language.