Possessive Adjectives

Possessive adjectives show ownership or a relationship and always come right before a noun: my book, her brother, their house. Each subject pronoun has its own possessive adjective: I → my, you → your, he → his, she → her, it → its, we → our, they → their.

English has seven possessive adjectives, one for each subject pronoun: my (I) — my phone; your (you) — your keys; his (he) — his car; her (she) — her bag; its (it) — its tail; our (we) — our house; their (they) — their children.

Your is the same for one person or many: Children, take your coats. Their can also mean one person whose gender you don't know or don't want to state: Someone left their umbrella.

To show ownership with a name or a noun instead of a pronoun, use possessive 's: Anna's bag → her bag, the dog's bowl → its bowl.

Its (no apostrophe) is the possessive adjective: The cat licks its paws. It's (with an apostrophe) is short for "it is": It's raining. A quick trick — if you can replace it with "it is" and the sentence still makes sense, use it's.

Possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her, its, our, their) go before a noun to show ownership: my book. Object pronouns (me, you, him, her, it, us, them) replace the object of a sentence and stand alone: I saw him.

Possessive adjectives always sit directly before a noun: This is my book. Possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs) replace the noun entirely and stand alone, usually at the end of a sentence: This book is mine. You can't say This is mine book — once the pronoun form is used, the noun disappears.

Most possessive pronouns just add -s to the adjective form (her → hers, our → ours, their → theirs), but two don't change at all: his stays his, and its is rarely used as a pronoun since The choice is its sounds wrong for almost every context.