het

Het is a Dutch word with two main roles: as the definite article for singular neuter nouns, and as the neutral pronoun meaning “it” in impersonal statements. In traditional Dutch, nouns are assigned gender, with de used for common gender and all plural nouns, and het used for neuter singular nouns. In practice, the choice of de or het is largely conventional, and many common nouns are learned with their article rather than inferred from meaning. Examples: het huis (the house), het kind (the child), de tafel (the table). Plural nouns use de regardless of the base gender: de huizen, de kinderen.

As a pronoun, het often functions as a dummy subject in weather and other impersonal expressions: Het regent. Het is koud vandaag. Here het does not refer to a specific noun but fills the syntactic slot needed for these predicates.

Diminutives and related forms reinforce the neuter pattern: many diminutive nouns take het as the article, such as het huisje (the little house) and het meisje (the girl). Diminutives are generally neuter in Dutch, which explains their het-article usage even when the base noun might have a different gender in other forms.

Etymology and related languages: het derives from Old Dutch as the neuter definite article and shares cognates with similar words in related Germanic languages. In Afrikaans, the same spelling het appears as the auxiliary verb meaning “have” in perfect constructions (ek het gedoen), a separate grammatical function from Dutch, though it reflects a common Germanic origin.