Here we go again: ‘We’-ism in fact and fiction

A post by the ever-interesting Grammarphobia blog. Read this and other similar posts at https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog

Q: When did using the “royal we” become popular among writers of fiction and nonfiction?

A: Writers have been using the pronoun “we” to refer to themselves since Anglo-Saxon days. But the usage was primarily seen in nonfiction until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and others began using it in fiction.

In Old English, the singular “we” was used by writers as well as sovereigns and other leaders. The earliest sovereign example in the Oxford English Dictionary describes the third-century Roman Emperor Decius speaking to Pope Sixtus II:

“Witodlice we beorgað þinre ylde, gehyrsuma urum bebodum & geoffra þam undeadlicum godum” (“Verily we have regard for thy age: obey our commands, and offer to the immortal gods”). From The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, written around 990 by the Benedictine Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham.

The next example, which we’ve expanded here, is from the Old English epic Beowulf, believed to date from the early 700s, though the earliest surviving manuscript is from around 1000. Beowulf, a battle leader, not a sovereign, speaks here after singlehandedly killing the monster Grendel:

“We þæt ellenweorc estum miclum, feohtan fremedon, frecne geneðdon eafoð uncuþes” (“We have engaged in a noble endeavor and have been greatly favored in this battle we dared to face against the unknown”).

Writers of nonfiction have regularly used the pronoun “we” in reference to themselves since the usage first appeared in Old English. The first OED example is from the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans):

“Nu hæbbe we scortlice gesæd ymbe Asia londgemæro” (“Now we have briefly spoken about the boundaries of Asia”).

As for fiction, the earliest examples we’ve found are from the 18th century. We especially like this one from The History of Tom Jones (1749), a novel by Henry Fielding:

“As we do not disdain to borrow wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either, we have condescended to take a hint from these honest victuallers, and shall prefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall likewise give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this and the ensuing volumes.”

The earliest fiction example cited in the OED is from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): “We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect, with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days.”

And we found this example in The History of Pendennis (1848–50), by William Makepeace Thackeray: “Arthur was about sixteen years old, we have said, when he began to reign.”

The practice of referring to oneself in the plural is called “nosism.” The word comes from the Latin nos (“we”), so it literally means we-ism.

We wrote a post in 2011 about the history of the term as well as its usage, which in various senses is referred to as “the royal we,” “the editorial we,” “the authorial we,” “the corporate we,” and so on.

We also published a post in 2017 on the use of “we” in the sense of “you,” as in a nurse asking a patient, “How are we feeling today?” or a primary-school teacher telling a student, “Now we won’t talk in class, will we?” These practices are known as “the hospital we” and the “kindergarten we.”

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