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Chambers (1908)

Its

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This edition’s origin note

[The old form was his, its not being older than the end of the 16th century. Its does not occur in the English Bible of 1611, or in Spenser, rarely in Shakespeare, and is not common until the time of Dryden.]

Original source wording, not an independently verified *SET-U conclusion.

The complete extracted entry

e-38538-6130

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Its, its, poss. pron. the possessive of it. [The old form was his, its not being older than the end of the 16th century. Its does not occur in the English Bible of 1611, or in Spenser, rarely in Shakespeare, and is not common until the time of Dryden.]

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  • Historical scholarship from 1908; not current consensus or editorial verification.
  • Historical text may contain offensive, obsolete or inaccurate language and classifications.
  • Public-domain determination applies to the United States; other jurisdictions require separate confirmation.
  • Chambers consulted earlier dictionaries including Skeat and the New English Dictionary; overlapping claims are not independent scholarly votes.

An old root, gloss or concordance number does not determine the meaning of every later use. A word’s origin and its modern meaning are different questions.

This page does not invent a manuscript attestation, a sound-change sequence, a modern scholarly verdict or a complete ancestor tree. Missing detail is a limit of this source record, not necessarily a limit of scholarship.

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Edition, rights and traceability

Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language
Thomas Davidson (editor)
1908

Public-domain-US ↗ · United States

Publisher marks these historical texts public domain in the USA. Transformed book text excludes Gutenberg branding; source attribution is a bibliographic acknowledgment. No non-US public-domain determination is made.

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Coverage: the complete A–Z main-entry clusters and dictionary Addenda. Derivative words remain within their original entry clusters. Non-dictionary appendices and standalone illustrations are excluded.

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