Intensive Pronoun Definition and Examples

In English grammar, intensive pronouns end in -self or -selves that serves to emphasize its antecedent. They are also known as intensive reflexive pronouns.

Intensive pronouns often appear as appositives after nouns or other pronouns.

Intensive pronouns have the same forms as reflexive pronouns: myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, oneself, and themselves. But unlike reflexive pronouns, intensive pronouns are not essential to the basic meaning of a sentence.

Quotes Containing Intensive Pronouns

Pat Schneider: "I have never yet failed to meet a deadline I myself have set up."

George Orwell: "He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic."

Buzzy Jackson: "'Janis Joplin' was a name now associated with an image, one that had grown bigger than the woman​ herself."

Katherine A. Beauchat: "Watching children make real progress in their language and literacy development is a reward with few rivals, especially because the children themselves greet their own accomplishments with such joy."

Mother Teresa: "We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."

Charlotte Brontë: "It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve."

Frederick Douglass: "When you, our white countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power, or privilege, which you yourselves would die before you would submit to have taken from you."

Toby Dodge: "Not until the problem itself is clearly diagnosed can a solution be found."

Patrick McCabe: "I found myself hoping that by the simple fact of extending some humanity towards poor old Ned, offering the unfortunate wretch some small degree of genuine understanding, that I myself had played some worthwhile role in this new and most welcome world of equanimity."