The royal we, or majestic plural, is a employed by a person of high office, such as a monarch, earl, or pope.
Editorial ''we''
The editorialwe is a similar phenomenon, in which an editorial columnist in a newspaper or a similar commentator in another medium refers to himself as we when giving their opinion. Here, the writer casts himself in the role of spokesperson: either for the media institution who employs them, or on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree with the commentary.
Author's ''we''
The author's we, or pluralis modestiae, is a practice referring to a generic third person as we :
By adding four and five, we obtain nine.
We are therefore led also to a definition of "time" in physics. — Albert Einstein
We in this sense often refers to "the reader and the author" because the author often assumes that the reader knows and agrees with certain principles or previous theorems for the sake of brevity. This practice is discouraged in the hard sciences, social sciences, humanities, and technical writing because it fails to distinguish between sole authorship and co-authorship.
Other
We is used sometimes in place of you to address a second party: A doctor may ask a patient: "And how are we feeling today?". A waiter may ask a client: "What are we in the mood for?" A similar usage exists in other languages. For example, José Luis Properzi of Argentine rock band Super Ratonesrevealed that the title of their song ¿Cómo estamos hoy, eh? was the greeting a taxi driver addressed to him.
Some languages, in particular the Austronesian languages, Dravidian languages, and Chinese varieties such as Min Nan and some Mandarin dialects, have a distinction in grammatical person between inclusivewe, which includes the person being spoken to in the group identified as we, and exclusivewe, which excludes the person being spoken to. Many Native American languages have this grammatical distinction, regardless of the languages' families. Cherokee, for instance, distinguishes between four forms of we, following an additional distinction between duality and plurality. The four Cherokee forms of we are: "you and I "; "another and I "; "others and I "; and "you, another, and I". Fijian goes even further with six words for we, with three numbers — dual, small group, and large group — and separate inclusive and exclusive forms for each number. In English this distinction is not made through grammatically different forms of we. The distinction is either evident from the context or can be understood through additional wording, for example through explicitly inclusive phrasing or through inclusive let's. The phrase let us eat is ambiguous: it may exclude the addressee, as a request to be left alone to eat, or it may include the addressee, as an invitation to come and eat, together. Let us ranges from the extremely formal to the relatively informal; the less formal the usage, the more likely the usage is to be exclusive. This less formal use of let us contrasts directly with the even more informal contracted formlet's, which is always inclusive.
