ourselves
/aʊəˈsɛlvz/pronoun
ourselves is spelled O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S. The wrong spelling people search most is ourselfs: about 20 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 18 of all searches for the word. Ourselves is a pronoun meaning “Us; the group including the speaker as the object of a verb or preposition when that group also is the subject”.
How many letters and syllables are in ourselves?
| Letters | 9: O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 3 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | 42 times per million words; the 2,392nd most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, ourselfs, about 20 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How do you spell ourselves?
Ourselves is spelled O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 19 of the searches for ourselves in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is ourselves?
Ourselves appears 42 times per million words in written English, the 2,392nd most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce ourselves?
- UK /aʊəˈsɛlvz/
- UK /ɑːˈsɛlvz/
- /wɐˈsɛlz/
Ourselves has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-ourselves.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of ourselves
- case of we
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does ourselves mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
pronoun
- 1
Us; the group including the speaker as the object of a verb or preposition when that group also is the subject.
We should keep this for ourselves.
- 2
Intensifies the subject as the group including the speaker, especially to indicate that no one else satisfies the predicate or needs to be included.
We did it ourselves.
- 3
colloquialReferring to everyone being addressed.
Come on everyone! Let's get ourselves up and out of bed, please.
- 4
colloquialReferring to an individual person being addressed, especially a person in the speaker's care; also ourself.
Coordinate term: nurse's we
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Ourselves in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does ourselves come from?
Morphologically our + -selves.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).