‘Methinks’ Isn’t What You Think

 

Have you ever wondered what's up with the weird word “methinks”? Why does it use an object for a subject (“Me thinks”), and why does it have an -s like a third-person verb (“thinks”) even though it seems to be in the first person? The answers are weirder than you may think!

But to find those answers, we’ll need to take a little dive into Old English, the form of English that was spoken between about 500 and 1100 AD. 

Not the Verb You’re Thinking Of

Old English had two different but related verbs, "þencan," meaning “to think,” and "þyncan," meaning “to seem or appear.” (The þ character is called a thorn, and it represents either the "th" sound in “thin” or the “th” sound in “then.”)

In Middle English these two verbs merged together in form, so they both were pronounced “thinken,” even though both the “seem” and “think” meanings remained distinct. But the one that meant “seem” could be used in a way that strikes modern English speakers as not just foreign but ungrammatical—it could appear with an object in place of the subject, specifically a dative object. But we’ll get to that in a second. First, we need to learn what the dative case is.

Seems to Me like a Dative Construction

Modern English has just one object case (as in “me” or “him” or “her”; “Squiggly likes her”), but Old English had two separate object cases: the accusative, which was mostly used for direct objects, and the dative, which was mostly used for indirect objects.

In a sentence like “She gave me the book,” “the book” is the direct object—it’s the thing being given. “Me” is the indirect object, because I’m the one receiving the thing that’s being given. Note that we can also say, “She gave the book to me,” with the indirect object “me” following the preposition “to.” So in some constructions, “me” and “to me” are equivalent. 

In Old English, using “me” to mean “to me” was more common, even in constructions where we would need the “to” today. For example, the “me” in “woe is me” was originally a dative—it really means “woe is to me.” (Our modern object pronouns actually come from the dative case; the accusative forms disappeared centuries ago, and the datives simply took their place.)

And the “think” verb that meant “seem” took objects in the dative case. That...

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