A possessive pronoun is a word that shows ownership and stands alone in place of a noun. Instead of saying that bag is my bag, you say that bag is mine — the pronoun already contains both the owner and the thing owned.
The possessive pronouns are mine, yours, his, hers, ours, and theirs.
Determiners vs pronouns
English has two kinds of possessive words, and they behave differently. Possessive determiners (my, your, his, her, its, our, their) sit in front of a noun. Possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs) replace the noun entirely.
| PERSON | DETERMINER | PRONOUN |
|---|---|---|
| I | my | mine |
| you | your | yours |
| he | his | his |
| she | her | hers |
| it | its | — |
| we | our | ours |
| they | their | theirs |
Notice that his has the same form in both columns, and its is almost never used as a pronoun in modern English — more on that below.
The contrast is easiest to see side by side:
A determiner needs a noun after it; a pronoun refuses one. That is mine book is wrong — you either say that is my book or that book is mine.
Where possessive pronouns appear
Possessive pronouns most often follow the verb be or another linking verb, because the speaker is identifying who owns something that both people can already see or know about.
They can also stand as the subject of a sentence when the owner is the point being made.
And they appear after than in comparisons, where the second half of the sentence would otherwise repeat the noun.
A friend of mine
English uses a special construction with of followed by a possessive pronoun. It means roughly one of my friends but feels more natural in everyday speech.
This pattern is called the double possessive. Use it when you want to say one of several without spelling it out. The wrong version — a friend of me or a cousin of them — is not grammatical in English.
Its as a possessive pronoun
The form its exists on paper but is almost never used as a standalone pronoun. You don't say the tail is its about a dog; you rephrase the sentence with the determiner instead: the dog has a long tail or its tail is long. This is the one gap in the table, and you can safely treat it as empty in practice.
Its vs it's — the classic trap
These two words sound identical but mean completely different things, and mixing them up is one of the most common written mistakes in English.
| FORM | MEANING | EXAMPLE |
|---|---|---|
| its | possessive determiner | The cat licked its paw. |
| it's | short for it is or it has | It's raining. |
The test is simple: if you can replace the word with it is or it has, you need the apostrophe. If you can't, you don't.
The same test works for you're / your, they're / their, and who's / whose. The form with the apostrophe is always a contraction, never a possessive.
No apostrophes on possessive pronouns
Possessive pronouns never take an apostrophe. This looks strange because English normally marks possession with 's (Sarah's car, the dog's tail), but pronouns are a closed set with their own fixed spelling.
If you ever feel tempted to write your's, remember that no standard English possessive pronoun has an apostrophe. Possessive nouns have their own rules — they're covered separately.
A note on whose
The word whose is the possessive form of who, and it can work either as a determiner (whose keys are these?) or as a pronoun. In this lesson it's enough to know that it belongs to the same family; its main role as a question word is covered separately.
Common mistakes
Adding an apostrophe
Its vs it's
Mixing determiners and pronouns
Wrong form after of
Trying to use its as a standalone pronoun