I. (|)wē, _wi, before “ʸre” or “are” usually (ˌ)wi pronoun, plural in construction
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English wē; akin to Old High German wir we, Old Norse vēr, Gothic weis, Sanskrit vayam
1.
a. : I and the rest of a group that includes me : you and I : you and I and another or others : I and another or others not including you — used as a nominative pronoun of the first person plural as the subject of a verb
we live here
we the people of the United States … do ordain and establish this constitution — U.S. Constitution
or in the predicate after a copulative verb
it is we who are the virtuous ones — Vance Packard
or in comparisons after than or as when the first term in the comparison is a subject
you know as much about it as we
or in some absolute constructions
ignorant, you say? we ?
or after but in a compound subject
none but we may say this
— used archaically as subject of an immediately preceding verb to introduce a request or proposal made by the speaker or writer to the group that includes himself where the current construction in ordinary present-day English consists of let us or let's followed by the verb
prepare we for our marriage — Shakespeare
— see our , us ; compare i , ours
b. : people in general including the speaker or writer
when we mind labor, then only, we' re too old — Robert Browning
2. : i II 1 — used by kings and other sovereigns
our sometime sister, now our queen … have we … taken to wife — Shakespeare
— used by editors and other writers to keep an impersonal character or to avoid the egotistical sound of a repeated I
3.
a. dialect chiefly England : us — used emphatically as object of a verb or preposition
to poor we thine enmity's most capital — Shakespeare
the likes of we
b. chiefly substandard : us — used in a compound object or in apposition with a following noun
he disturbed those in the dining room, those in the hall, and even we who had retired upstairs
as to we men — Fanny Burney
4. : you — used coaxingly (as to a child)
we don't want to wake Daddy, do we
or encouragingly (as to a patient)
how are we feeling this morning
or in sarcasm
aren't we getting a little impudent
II. ˈwē noun
( -s )
: a group that is consciously felt as such by its members
the crowd is like a community in that it can be any size, the difference being that the We precedes the I — Howard Griffin