Ya
adv, det, intj, name, noun, particle, pron, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A letter of the Cyrillic alphabet: Я, я.
- 2 Initialism of young adult abbreviation, alt-of, especially, initialism
"22 March 2012, Scott Tobias, AV Club The Hunger Gameshttp://www.avclub.com/articles/the-hunger-games,71293/ While Collins does include a love triangle, a coming-of-age story, and other YA-friendly elements in the mix, they serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle readers into a hopeless world where love becomes a stratagem and growing up is a matter of basic survival."
- 3 Initialism of youth authority. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
- 1 yea; yes Northern-England, Scotland, UK, West-Country, dialectal, not-comparable
"'Ya, wilt thou!' said Wallace, 'then tak thee that, […]'"
- 1 Nonstandard spelling of you. alt-of, nonstandard
"But you don't really care for music, do ya?"
- 1 Yeah; yes. informal
- 2 Go. (Spoken to horses and cattle.) informal
- 3 Yes, yeah (used to express affirmation) Malaysia, Singapore, informal
- 1 Nonstandard spelling of your. alt-of, nonstandard
- 1 Used to form a confirmation-seeking tag question, expecting an affirmative response. Manglish, Singlish
"What about yourself Mr Chee, never look a day older, you'll see the rest of us six feet under… Really you look very well. I heard you went for new treatment in Switzerland ya?…"
- 1 A surname from Tamil.
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I think it might be useful if you could add how to output the diphthongs (with small ya/yu/yo) and geminate consonants (with small tsu)."
Etymology
Reduced form of you. Compare Dutch je, reduced/unstressed form of jij (“you”).
Apparently from German ja and cognates in other Germanic languages; related to English yeah.
From Middle English ya, from Old English ġēa, iā (“yea, yes”). More at yea.
Variation of hyah.
From Russian я (ja).
From Malay ya, from Dutch ja (and ultimately Proto-Germanic *ja). Reinforced by informal variants of yes in English (e.g., yeah). Doublet of yes.
Borrowed from Tamil யா (yā). This surname is the 5ᵗʰ most common surname in Tamil Nadu.
Related phrases
More for "ya"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.