A word that takes a place of a noun (for example, I, me, he, she, herself, you, it, that, they, few, many, who, whoever, someone, everybody, and many others).

There are different types of pronouns:

• personal pronouns represent specific people or things (for example, I, he, she, it, they, we, you, me him, her, them). Example of personal pronoun use: David and Max (proper nouns) went to school. They went to school. Personal pronouns can also be objective (for example, David kicked the ball to Max. David kicked the ball to him.)

• demonstrative pronouns represent a thing or things (for example, this, these, that, those). Example of demonstrative pronoun use: ‘Who owns these?’

• possessive pronouns to refer to the belonging of one thing or person to another person or thing (for example, mine, hers, his, ours, yours, theirs). Examples of possessive pronoun use: ‘Max looked for the book. He could not find his own book but he did find yours.’

• reflexive pronouns refer back to the subject of a sentence or clause. Reflexive pronouns end in ‘-self’ (singular) or ‘-selves’ (plural) (for example, myself,yourself,himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves themselves). Example of possessive pronoun use: ‘David looked at himself in the mirror.’

• reciprocal pronouns refer to two subjects acting in the same way toward each other. There must be two or more subjects involved and they must be doing the same thing (for example, each other, one another). Example of reciprocal pronoun use: David and Max like each other.

• relative pronouns introduce a relative clause. They are called relative because they relate to the words that they modify. There are five relative pronouns: who, whom, whose, which,that. Example of relative pronoun use: ‘The car, which was in the garage, was damaged.’

• interrogative pronouns represent things that we do not know and are asking the questions about (for example, who, whom, whose, which, what). Some interrogative pronouns can also function as relative pronouns. Examples of interrogative pronoun use: ‘Who told David?’ ‘Which of these would David like?’

• indefinite pronouns do not refer to any specific person, thing or amount (for example, all, another, anybody, anyone, anything, each, everybody, everyone, everything, many, nobody, none, one, several, some, somebody, someone). Example of relative pronoun use: ‘Have you taken anything from the cupboard?’