Spanish Possessive Adjectives

Spanish short-form possessives sit before the noun (mi coche, tu casa, nuestros amigos) and agree with the thing possessed, not the possessor. That last bit is the rule English speakers forget: nuestras hijas (our daughters) uses the feminine plural because hijas is feminine plural, regardless of who the parents are.

The full table

Note the split: mi, tu, su only mark number (mi/mis, tu/tus, su/sus). Nuestro and vuestro mark both number and gender (four forms each). There's no logic to this beyond Latin inheritance - memorise it as the pattern.

Agreement with the noun

The possessive matches the thing possessed.

• mi libro (my book - masculine singular)
• mis libros (my books - plural)
• nuestra casa (our house - feminine singular)
• nuestros amigos (our friends - masculine plural)
• vuestras hermanas (your sisters - feminine plural, vosotros possessor)

The gender of the possessor doesn't matter. A father and a mother both say mi hija (my daughter) and mi hijo (my son), because the agreement is with the child's grammatical gender, not the parent's.

The su problem

Su covers his, her, your-formal (usted), their, and your-plural-formal (ustedes). It's the most overloaded pronoun in the language. Su coche could mean any of:

• his car
• her car
• your car (formal singular)
• their car
• your car (formal plural)

Context usually fixes it. When it doesn't, Spanish reaches for the de + pronoun workaround: el coche de él, el coche de ella, el coche de ustedes. This is grammatical, common in speech, and the right move whenever su would be ambiguous.

Worked examples

• Mi madre vive en Madrid. (My mother lives in Madrid.)
• ¿Dónde están tus llaves? (Where are your keys?)
• Nuestra casa es pequeña. (Our house is small.)
• Sus hijos estudian en Londres. (Their / his / her / your children study in London.)
• Vuestros amigos son simpáticos. (Your friends are nice. Spain only - vosotros possessor.)

Body parts and clothing

A quirk worth flagging: Spanish often drops the possessive for body parts and clothing, replacing it with the definite article plus a reflexive or indirect object pronoun.

• Me duele la cabeza. (My head hurts. Literally: the head hurts to me.)
• Se lavó las manos. (He washed his hands.)
• Ponte la chaqueta. (Put on your jacket.)

Saying me duele mi cabeza is grammatical but sounds foreign. The article-plus-pronoun construction is the native default.

Long-form possessives (briefly)

Spanish also has long-form possessives - mío, tuyo, suyo, nuestro, vuestro, suyo - which go after the noun or stand alone as pronouns.

• un amigo mío (a friend of mine)
• ese coche es tuyo (that car is yours)
• el libro es suyo (the book is his / hers / theirs)

These are Higher-tier and lived through later. For the Foundation curriculum, the short forms above carry 95% of the load. The intermediate Spanish grammar page covers the long forms in full.

See also

• The Spanish grammar cheatsheet covers the wider A1-B1 grammar map.
• The Spanish articles page covers the body-parts-with-definite-article construction.