This question came in from a listener: Why do we need the word “it” at the beginning of sentences, as in “It rains quite often”?
Well, the English language has plenty of quirks, and this is one of them. Who or what is the mysterious “it” that keeps doing all this stuff?
We find the word “it” in sentences like:
- “It’s raining.” (But what exactly is doing the raining?)
- “It’s getting dark.” (Who or what is making it dark?)
- “It’s freezing in here!” (But who or what ordered the Arctic temperatures?)
- “It takes time to learn a language.” (What exactly is doing the taking of time?)
‘It’ functions as an expletive or dummy subject
Think of “it” in these sentences as a special kind of pronoun. Most pronouns stand in for actual nouns — like when we say, “She went to the store,” where “she” stands in for “Sarah,” or “Squiggly ate them!” where “them” stands in for “the cookies.” But this “it” is more like a grammatical placeholder. In formal grammar-speak, we call this an “expletive” or “dummy” subject. It’s kind of like putting extras in movie scenes when the real star is the action itself.
Examples of ‘it’ as a dummy subject
Let’s break it down with an example about the weather: “It is raining.” In that sentence:
- “It” is our placeholder pronoun, the subject of the sentence.
- Then we have a linking verb: “is.”
- [And] “Raining” is a present participle — it describes the action.
In that sentence, “it” isn’t actually referring to anything specific — it’s just there because English sentences get stage fright without a subject. It’s like having a stand-in actor who doesn’t actually perform but needs to be there so the show can go on.
What is a grammatical expletive?
You might have been confused when I referred to the placeholder “it” as an “expletive.” Casually, we usually associate expletives with swear words. But in linguistic terms, an expletive is just a word that doesn’t have a semantic context of its own — it serves only a grammatical function, like the “it” in “It’s raining.”
‘It’ is also a regular pronoun
It’s also worth explaining that the word “it” isn’t always a mysterious stand-in for some absent “who” or “what” — it plays different roles depending on how you’re using it.
When “it” refers to something specific, it’s just a regular pronoun, like in:
“I bought a book. It was expensive.”
Here, “it” clearly refers to the book.
There’s also something called the anticipatory ‘it’
There’s also an anticipatory “it.” That’s when the word “it” saves a place for something that comes later in the sentence. As in:
“It bothers me that people litter.”
The real subject is those three words referring to a singular thing: “that people litter.” You could put the subject first if you wanted to:
“That people litter bothers me.”
But that sounds less conversational; most of us don’t talk that way. For whatever reason, we like it better with the dummy “it” at the beginning: “It bothers me that people litter.”
Do languages other than English have dummy subjects?
Not every language has this placeholder “it,” though. In some languages, you don’t need the stand-in at all. Linguists call those “null-subject languages.”
Let’s look again at our “It’s raining” example. Spanish, for example, doesn’t need the placeholder “it.” Instead, the verb itself does the heavy lifting. When a Spanish speaker says “llueve” — which literally means “rains” — the way the verb is conjugated tells you everything you need to know. It’s the complete package, no extra words needed. English insists on having both a subject and a verb (“it rains”), while Spanish is like, “Nah, we’ve got this covered with just the verb!” Their verbs are super-powered that way. Italian and Portuguese, which are also Romance languages like Spanish, are similar; the verb conjugation does all the work.
Japanese rarely uses pronouns at all; the subject is often implied by the context. The same is true for Mandarin Chinese and Korean if the subject is understood. Linguists call these “pro-drop languages” — where the pronoun is dropped because it’s already understood.
So next time you say, “It’s beautiful outside,” you can appreciate this tiny but mighty word. It’s doing absolutely nothing, yet somehow, it’s an essential part of how we express ourselves in English.