This grammatical habit has a name: nosism, from the Latin nos, meaning “we.” It’s the practice of referring to oneself using a plural pronoun, and its most famous incarnation is the pluralis majestatis—the majestic plural, or “royal we.” But nosism extends far beyond thrones and crowns. It echoes through papal encyclicals, newspaper editorials, academic journals, and even your doctor’s office. To understand why, we need to travel back nearly two thousand years.
Imperial Origins: Rome and the Birth of the Majestic Plural
The royal we is often traced to the later Roman Empire. One popular theory points to the reign of Diocletian in the 3rd century CE, when the empire was ruled by multiple co-emperors under the Tetrarchy. When an emperor issued a decree, he technically spoke on behalf of his imperial colleagues as well—so “we” was, at least initially, literally accurate. Even earlier, emperors sharing power (such as during joint reigns) may have adopted plural self-reference for the same practical reason.
But what began as administrative accuracy soon hardened into rhetorical convention. Even when a single emperor held absolute power, the plural persisted. Why? Because it had acquired a new meaning: the emperor was no longer merely a man, but an institution. His voice carried the weight of the state, the army, the gods, and the empire itself. “We” signalled that the speaker was more than an individual—he was a collective embodiment of power.
Medieval Monarchs and the King’s Two Bodies
Medieval European kings inherited and enthusiastically embraced this Roman convention. In England, the royal we is often (perhaps apocryphally) attributed to Henry II in the 12th century, who claimed to speak jointly with God, or to Richard I, whose royal charters employed the plural form. By the later Middle Ages, the majestic plural was standard in royal proclamations across Europe.
The practice found its most elegant justification in a medieval legal doctrine known as the “king’s two bodies.” According to this theory, articulated most famously by Tudor-era jurists, the monarch possessed both a body natural (the mortal, fallible human being) and a body politic (the eternal, incorporeal embodiment of the realm). When a king said “we”, he spoke as both: the man and the crown, the person and the nation. The plural pronoun was, in effect, grammatical theology.
This is why the royal we sounds so jarring when used inappropriately. When Margaret Thatcher announced in 1989, “We have become a grandmother”, the British press erupted in mockery. A prime minister, however powerful, has only one body. The plural belonged to the Queen—and everyone knew it.
The Papal We: Speaking for the Church
The Vatican developed its own robust tradition of nosism. For centuries, popes wrote encyclicals and delivered pronouncements using the first-person plural, sometimes called the pluralis maiestatis in its ecclesiastical form. The logic mirrored the royal version: the pope spoke not as a private individual but as the head of the universal Church, the successor of Peter, and the voice of an institution spanning centuries and continents.
Interestingly, this tradition has softened in modern times. Pope John Paul I, during his brief 1978 papacy, famously preferred the simple “I” in his addresses—a deliberate gesture of humility that startled Vatican traditionalists. Subsequent popes have largely followed suit in informal contexts, though the plural still appears in some formal documents. The shift illustrates a broader modern discomfort with linguistic grandeur: what once signalled legitimate authority now risks sounding pompous.
The Editorial We: Authority Without a Crown
Nosism didn’t stay confined to palaces and basilicas. In the 18th and 19th centuries, newspapers adopted what became known as the “editorial we.” An unsigned editorial declaring “We believe this policy is misguided” wasn’t claiming royal status—it was claiming institutional voice. The opinion belonged not to one journalist but to the publication itself, its editorial board, and implicitly its readership and tradition.
Mark Twain, ever the deflater of pretension, skewered the habit with a quip often attributed to him: “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.'” The joke lands because it exposes the mechanism—the editorial we borrows the grammar of majesty to lend weight to what might otherwise be one person’s opinion.
The Academic We: Modesty or Convention?
Academia offers a fascinating twist. Scholarly writing, especially in mathematics and the sciences, has long favoured the first-person plural even in single-authored papers: “We now prove the theorem”, “We observe that the results confirm our hypothesis.” But here the plural serves an almost opposite purpose. Rather than the pluralis majestatis, linguists call this the pluralis modestiae—the plural of modesty.
The academic we does several jobs at once:
- It deflects ego. “I discovered” sounds boastful; “we found” sounds collaborative and humble.
- It invites the reader in. “We now turn to the evidence” positions author and reader as fellow travellers working through the argument together—linguists sometimes call this the “inclusive authorial we.”
- It signals objectivity. The plural suggests the findings would hold for anyone following the same method, not just the individual researcher.
So the same pronoun that elevates a monarch above humanity can lower a scholar into the collective. Context, as always in linguistics, is everything.
The Patronizing We: Power in Disguise
There’s one more variant worth noting: the so-called “nurse’s we” or “patronizing we”, as in “How are we feeling today?” or “Have we taken our medicine?” Here the plural masquerades as solidarity while subtly asserting control—the speaker isn’t actually feeling anything or taking any medicine. Linguists note that this usage, however well-intentioned, positions the listener as dependent, which is why many patients find it grating. It’s the royal we turned inside out: instead of inflating the speaker, it diminishes the addressee.
Why Plurality Means Power
What unites these disparate uses? Across languages and centuries, plurality has been a grammatical marker of social weight. This isn’t unique to self-reference. Consider the T-V distinction found in French (tu/vous), German (du/Sie), and many other languages, where the plural second-person pronoun serves as the polite or formal form of address. English itself once made this distinction—thou was singular and intimate, you plural and respectful—until you conquered the entire territory.
The underlying logic seems almost universal: to be plural is to be more. More people, more authority, more space in the social world. When an emperor said nos, he was claiming to contain multitudes—the state, the law, the divine mandate. Grammar became a throne.
Today, the royal we survives mostly as a curiosity, deployed in formal proclamations and gentle jokes. But its descendants—the editorial we, the academic we, the corporate “we at this company”—are alive and thriving. Whenever a single voice wants to sound like many, nosism stands ready. We are, it turns out, still quite amused by it.