A sentence using the word its

Examples of how to use the word “its” in a sentence. How to connect “its” with other words to make correct English sentences.

its (det): belonging to or relating to something that has already been mentioned

Use “its” in a sentence

It’s happened to all of us: you type it’s and later realize you meant its. (And by «realize» we occasionally mean, «got flamed in the comments section.»)

The rule is actually pretty simple: use the apostrophe after it only when part of a word has been removed: it’s raining means it is raining; it’s been warm means it has been warm. It’s is a contraction, in the style of can’t for cannot and she’s for she is.

But this rule wouldn’t have worked a few centuries ago.

History of It’s vs. Its

Long ago, English was like many other languages in that every noun had a gender: masculine, feminine, or neuter. Pronouns — those efficient little words we use to stand in for nouns, like I, you, he, she, we, they, and it — also had gender; the gender of a pronoun was determined by the gender of the noun it referred to. The possessive pronoun for neuter nouns was his: «April with his sweet showers.» But when English began to link his and her only to actual males and females, his for objects seemed increasingly wrong, and it — with no s — began to be used: «April with it sweet showers.» Around 1600 it’s began to be used: «April with it’s sweet showers.» The it’s had an apostrophe, just like a possessive noun like April’s would.

This apostrophe form of the possessive remained extremely common throughout the 17th century. The version without the apostrophe only became dominant in the 18th century — probably because it’s was taking on a new role, replacing the contraction ’tis. It’s here had arrived and ’tis here was fading away.

We still see the possessive it’s in dashed-off tweets and in flyers from local mattress stores, but the fact that it was right 300 years ago doesn’t make it correct today. For those of us who live — and write — in the here and now, use it’s only when you mean it is or it has. And drop that apostrophe everywhere else.

Sentences starting with its

• Its rear communicated with the bastille by a drawbridge, under which ran a swift and deep strip of the Loire. [5]
• Its deck glittered with precious stones. [10]
• Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation. [6]
• Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature; that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place meanwhile, and abolished and obliterated it. [5]
• Its very eccentricities were within the limits of good form. [9]
• Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism. [6]
• Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos. [6]
• Its ample nurseries were producing oranges, apricots, lemons, almonds, peaches, cherries, 48 varieties of apples—in fact, all manner of fruits, and in abundance. [5]
• Its precipitous sides were powdered over with snow, and the upper half hidden in thick clouds which now and then dissolved to cobweb films and gave brief glimpses of the imposing tower as through a veil. [5]
• Its sloping sides were of pearl. [4]

Short sentences using its

• It buys its way. [11]
• Its technical excellence was considerable. [4]
• Everything in its turn. [5]
• Its side was toward me. [5]
• Ursula examined its tongue. [5]
• What is its testimony? [5]
• Its effect was striking. [11]
• Its discipline was strict. [4]
• That is its soul. [5]
• Venters divined its significance. [13]

Sentences containing its two or more times

• The splendour of youth is its madness, and the splendour of that madness is its unconquerable belief. [11]
• Youth answering to youth had claimed its own; love springing from the dawn, brave and bright-eyed, had waved its wand towards that good country called Home. [11]
• But what would youth be without its extravagances,—its preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and unstinted admiration? [6]
• This is a young tree, with a future before it, if barbarians do not meddle with it, more conspicuous for its spread than its circumference, stretching not very far from a hundred feet from bough-end to bough-end. [6]
• What straggles of young ambition, finding no place for its energies, or feeling its incapacity to reach the ideal towards which it was striving! [6]
• The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression. [6]
• With a glass you can see the cow-sheds about its base, and the contented sheep nimbling pebbles in the desert solitudes that surround it, and the tired pigs dozing in the holy calm of its protecting shadow. [5]
• They swarm about you at every step; no single foot of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without a stirring and important history of its own. [5]
• Manufactures had not yet invaded the region either to add to its wealth or to defile its streams. [4]
• For four thousand years its waters have not gone dry or its fertility failed. [5]

More example sentences with the word its in them

• If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a caraway-umbel late in the season. [6]
• He devoted himself zealously to the task, and soon was so successful that the plays at Tauromenium, and the musical performances in its Odeum, attracted the citizens in crowds, and were talked of far and wide. [10]
• R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand and its Inhabitants,’ 1855, p. [1]
• Those verses were youth, and youth was gone, with all its flushed and spirited dalliance and reckless expenditure of feeling. [11]
• Every time a youth looks love in a maiden’s eyes, and sees the timid appealing return of the universal passion, the world for those two is just as certainly created as it was on the first morning, in all its color, odor, song, freshness, promise. [4]
• Here the persecuted youth changed his name, Horus, to its Greek equivalent, and henceforth he was known at home and in the schools as Apollo. [10]
• You can judge yourselves whether the tottering reason ever recovered its throne. [5]
• Have you not yourself seen, even in your short life, that what is highest and greatest can in its excess, be all that is most hideous? [10]
• It will lead your thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose itself. [6]
• I go from your philosophical discussions to the reading of Jeremy Taylor’s «Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying» without feeling that I have unfitted myself in the least degree for its solemn reflections. [6]
• The honeysuckle in your garden needs a support, that it may grow and put forth flowers; let these poor songs be the espalier around which your memory of the absent one can twine its tendrils and cling lovingly. [10]
• They have freed your flag where the white Pole-Star Hangs out its auroral flame; Where the bones of your Franklin’s heroes are They have honoured your ancient name. [11]
• You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. [5]
• I shall watch your distressed career to its close with deep scrutiny. [11]
• The stockholders of your corporation, perhaps, are bound to suffer some from the fact that you have taken its life-blood to pay dividends, and the public will demand that it be built up into a normal and healthy condition. [9]
• If I comprehend your art aright, its essence is opposed to the addition of superhuman dignity and beauty, with which you, or the model you used, strove to ennoble and deify your Demeter. [10]
• A very interesting young married woman, detained at home at the time by the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of her own house by a rattlesnake which had found its way down from The Mountain. [6]
• He was a young man with a smooth face, and a frank brown eye which paid its tribute to Virginia. [9]
• By its terms you, the guilty one, go free with the innocent. [5]
• What may delight you will cost bitter tears to many others, and so let us both hope that this splendid spectacle may now have reached its climax, and soon may come to an end. [10]
• Therefore I entreat you to forget the armlet and its many painful associations, and pass to the consideration of other matters. [10]
• You smile as you think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white drapery thrown over it for protection. [6]
• But, Aristomachus, would you then avoid the few Oases in the desert, because you must afterwards return to its sands and drought? [10]
• I have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,—if I have overcome them, which others must decide. [6]
• I could tell you such tales of its cleverness! [10]
• I have told you some of the drawbacks of age; I would not have you forget its privileges. [6]
• The social law you sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless. [11]
• Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! [5]
• The company, don’t you see, must not in any way be suspected with having anything to do with it, no mention of its name as a company, no advertisement of the road on a fly-leaf or cover. [4]
• The next time you see a tree waving in the wind, recollect that it is the tail of a great underground, many-armed, polypus-like creature, which is as proud of its caudal appendage, especially in summer-time, as a peacock of his gorgeous expanse of plumage. [6]
• Separation, of which you say so much that is bad, does not seem to have had its usual effect on you. [2]
• From its summit you look south into a vast wilderness basin, a great stretch of forest little trodden, and out of whose bosom you can hear from the heights on a still day the loud murmur of the Boquet. [4]
• Nobody could tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobody ever went intentionally to any place, but only struck it by accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it without thinking to inquire what its name was. [5]
• If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back way. [5]
• Besides, what can you do with a morbidness which has its origin in fateful circumstances? [11]
• As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. [6]
• That’s the way you begun here, I guess; and I don’t want to see your horse tumble because some one throws a fence-rail at its legs. [11]
• It only disappoints you as to its «vine-clad hills. [4]
• To your sorrow you are aware that frequently, much too frequently, when a book gets to be five or ten years old its annual sale shrinks to two or three hundred copies, and after an added ten or twenty years ceases to sell. [5]
• The poor bird yonder is as well qualified to encounter it, and be turned adrift upon its mercies—Hark! [12]
• Both were hers, yet, though the infant raised its voice still louder, she remained at the spinning wheel, dreaming on. [10]
• And yet, and yet!—If she had really had the power to bind calamity in the clouds, to turn the tide back into its channel, she would not have done so! [10]
• The man laughed, yet without a sound—the inward, stealthy laugh, as from a knowledge wicked in its very suggestiveness. [11]
• But this development, yet in its infancy, and pursued with much crudeness and misconception of the end, is not enough. [4]
• It was not yet dawn, however, for the clocks were only striking three as the assembly, in winter coats and soft wraps, fluttered out to its carriages, chattering and laughing, with endless good-nights in the languages of France, Germany, and Spain. [4]
• Now and then, yes, very often, out of some paradise, no doubt, strays into New England conditions of reticence and self-denial such a sweet spirit, to diffuse a breath of heaven in its atmosphere, and to wither like a rose ungathered. [4]
• It shrieks and yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits. [8]
• For thousands of years the story of the Exodus has lived in the minds of numberless people as something actual, and it still retains its vitality. [10]
• For a hundred years the South was developed on its own lines, with astonishingly little exterior bias. [4]
• Not that Tom yearned for the slipper; but he regarded its occasional applications as being as inevitable as changes in the weather; lying did not come easily to him, and left to himself he much preferred to confess and have the matter over with. [9]
• That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock’s army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. [6]
• A delicious dreaminess wrought its web about my yielding senses, while the snow-flakes wove a winding sheet about my conquered body. [5]
• The gentleman who wrote the newspaper paragraph above quoted had not been misled as to its character. [5]
• And yesterday I wrote another letter from Constantinople and 1 today about its neighbor in Asia, Scatter. [5]
• Spite of the wrong he had done her, how gladly, had she not been lost to art, she would now have tried upon him its elevating, consoling power! [10]
• But it is written that every happiness has its sting; and my joy, intense though it was, had in it a core of remorse…. [9]
• Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the place. [5]
• The amount of writing against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of its piety. [4]
• He could not write about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice. [6]
• Nor can I write a book for its moral. [14]
• A great green wreath, which must have cost the parent oak a large fraction of its foliage, was an object of special admiration. [6]
• He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker. [6]
• Very often a wounded animal, hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the hunter’s gun, runs forward and back again, and hastens its own end. [2]
• Far below them wound the Blue into its vale of sapphire shadows, with its hillsides of the mystic fabric of the backgrounds of the masters of the Renaissance. [9]
• No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. [5]
• Heaven, she thought, would pour its favour upon her too lavishly if the report that Don John was to be appointed Governor of the Netherlands should be verified. [10]
• Yet no, it would not go, but stayed there, tipping its gold-brown head at me as though it would invite me to guess why it came. [11]
• A wise company would not arm you with so drastic an order as this, of course, without appointing a penalty for its infringement. [5]
• How all Washington would gather up its virtuous skirts and avoid me, if it knew. [5]
• The Federal Government would find its highest interest in such a measure, as one of the most efficient means of self-preservation. [7]
• Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. [5]
• Without that it would be unable to develop its mines, build its roads, work to advantage and without great waste its fruitful land, establish manufactures or enter upon a prosperous industrial career. [5]
• The College plain would be nothing without its elms. [6]
• In short, it would be much more agreeable if it extended to its own members something of the consideration and sympathy that it gives to those it regards as its inferiors. [4]
• The gem was worthy of its loveliness. [10]
• It was only worth twenty-five dollars—that is, apparently that was its whole cost—but its ultimate cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more. [5]
• This gift was worth twenty houses in the city, and made its owner a rich man. [10]
• What life ever worth living has been without its tender attachment? [9]
• It is the worst of policy, to say nothing of its being the worst of art; and life should never be without art. [11]
• And in its worst form, too; for it was not a tax upon what the miner had taken out, but upon what he was going to take out—if he could find it. [5]
• It must have worn a different aspect to Ruth, for she entered into its pleasures at first with curiosity, and then with interest and finally with a kind of staid abandon that no one would have deemed possible for her. [5]
• And now this world with all its vain show had plumped down in the midst of them. [4]
• Into a New World wandered I, A world austere, sublime; And unseen feet came sauntering by; A voice with ardent chime Rang down the idle lanes of sleep; I waked: the night was still; I saw my star its sentry keep Along a southern hill. [11]
• It was a world of unbridled will, this, where the soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled involuntarily when he put Sarasate’s fiddle to his chin this Autumn evening. [11]
• Every real thinker’s world of thought has its centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle round the sun which cast them off. [6]
• Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know—there’s a grave somewhere for me. [5]
• But into the workshop came the moist, fragrant smell of the acacia and the maple, and a long brown lizard stretched its neck sleepily across the threshold of the door opening into the valley. [11]
• After this I worked uninterruptedly with fresh zeal and I may say renewed pleasure at the perilous yet fascinating task until its completion. [10]
• He might have worked it up with more art, and given it a finish which the narration now lacks, but I think best to insert it in its simplicity. [4]
• He liked my work, saw its defects, and was always frank about them, and I designed a good many gardens in connection with his houses. [9]
• One has to work, however, in one’s own way, after one’s own idiosyncrasies, and here is the book that represents one of my own idiosyncrasies in its most primitive form. [11]
• Something was at work, as real in its effects as the sunlight, but invisible. [9]
• They set to work with their hatchets, and were soon creeping, insectlike, up its surface, with their heels projecting over the thinnest kind of nothingness, thickened up a little with a few wandering shreds and films of cloud moving in a lazy procession far below. [5]
• The piece of work was only half unrolled, but Orion at once saw the spot whence its crowning glory was now missing—the large emerald which, as he alone could know, was on its way to Constantinople. [10]
• There was no work to do; that was all finished; this was but the second session of the last winter’s Congress, and its action on the bill could have but one result—its passage. [5]
• Sunday She doesn’t work Sundays, but lies around all tired out, and likes to have the fish wallow over her; and she makes fool noises to amuse it, and pretends to chew its paws, and that makes it laugh. [5]
• And its gracious work is not done yet—not anywhere in the remote neighborhood of it. [5]
• The forces at work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which habitable worlds are evolved. [6]
• You’ve heard the words of the song—the river drivers sing it: «‘What is there like to the cry of the bird That sings in its nest in the lilac tree? [11]
• Something in her words had ruled him to her own calmness, and at that moment he had the first flash of understanding of her nature and its true relation to his own. [11]

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