Words like here, now, and you only make sense when you know who is speaking and from where. Deixis is the phenomenon by which certain expressions depend for their reference on the context of utterance—especially person, place, and time.

Person deixis distinguishes speaker, addressee, and others. Spatial deixis locates entities relative to the speaker. Temporal deixis anchors events to the moment of speaking. Gestures often accompany deictic words.

Languages encode deixis with different degrees of elaboration. Translators and dialogue systems struggle when the deictic center shifts. Pragmatics treats deixis as clear proof that meaning is not fully contained inside sentences alone.

• Context-dependent reference to person, place, or time
• Includes terms such as I, here, and tomorrow
• Often supported by gesture
• Varies in complexity across languages