Other forms: mines
Mine is the one that belongs to me. It stands where my plus a noun would go: that coat is mine rather than that is my coat. English has a whole set of these — yours, hers, ours, theirs — and mine is the one that breaks the pattern by not ending in s.
It is also a place dug into the ground to bring out coal, gold or salt, and from there the verb to mine. And, unhappily, a mine is a hidden bomb waiting in a field or a harbour. The three senses share a spelling and almost nothing else.
1pronounpossessiveThe one that belongs to me.~2%
“That coat is mine, not yours.”
2nounmineThe workings from which ore or coal is dug.~80%
“The mine closed in the eighties.”
3nounbombA hidden bomb that goes off when somebody steps on it or drives over it.~18%
“The field was still full of mines.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Middle English
min
English, today
mine
From Middle English min. From Middle English min, myn, from Old English mīn, from Proto-West Germanic mīn, from Proto-Germanic mīnaz, from Proto-Indo-European méynos. Cognate with stq mien, West Frisian myn, Dutch mijn, Low German mien, German mein, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish min, Faroese and Icelandic mín.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA