Is "Please to" proper English?

I have been around on Twitter for awhile and I regularly find people using "Please to retweet this" or "Please to help me", etc. Is this proper English? I do not think prefixing the infinitive form with a 'to' is necessary here at all.


As can be seen from most of the answers and comments, native speakers today generally feel that constructions such as "Please to give me that" are "invalid", but they certainly weren't always...

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Modern usage of single-word "please" in the "polite entreaty" sense is very different to the original (a short form of "may it please you to"). We can now place it quite flexibly within a request...

  • Please give me that.

  • Give me that please.

  • Will you please give me that. (usually terminated with '?', though it's rarely a question!)

  • Will you please to give me your arm? (William Thackeray, in Harper's magazine, 1858)

  • Will you please to give my respects to your friends. (no '?' there in 1835!)

  • I ask you please to give it your support. (Albert Einstein, Collected Papers, 1090-1920)

Most people will feel that the 4th and 5th examples there are somehow "ungrammatical", but clearly they weren't considered so at time of writing, and no new rule of grammar has since been introduced. And many people will feel that Einstein's usage would be somehow "sanitised" by placing commas before and after "please". In the end though, the truth is that our current usage of the word "please" is just that; a matter of (shifting) common usage, not grammatical rules.

TL;DR: Indian English is just a bit behind the times, not ignorant as such.


Using please to help me instead of please help me is incorrect. However, the following examples are correct:

Help me, please, to do my homework.

I am pleased to help you.

We use "please" to make a request more polite.


While other answers are technically correct in that it is not proper UK English, it appears to be a very common form in Indian English.

In UK English I lean to being prescriptive, in other Englishes I lean to being descriptive.


I have noticed that sentences starting with a [Marker] + to + Infinitive pattern are very common in Asian Englishes, like some Wh-Questions like ones often posed here on ELU.SE

  • How to distinguish imperfect from aorist?
  • When to use gerundive?

or truncated predicate adjectives

  • OK to use "will" in inchoative clauses?
  • Incorrect to use apostrophe's like this?

etc. I think the pattern may be widespread in speech, and thence in informal writing. But I haven't been in Asia observing speech patterns for a long time.

In any event,

  • Please to remove shoes.

is just more of the same pattern.

(I could go on about what that may mean for the future of to and other markers but I forbear.)