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In Modern English, it is a singular, neuter, third-person personal pronoun.
| +Old English, third-person pronoun ! ! colspan="3" | Singular ! rowspan="2" | Plural |
This neuter pronoun, like the masculine and feminine ones, was used for both people and objects (inanimate or abstract). in Anglo-Saxon had grammatical genders, which were not necessarily the same as the gender of the person(s) referred to (though they tended to accord with the endings of the words). For instance, Old-English (the ancestor of "child", pronounced "chilled") is neuter, as are both and , literally "male-child" and "female-child" (grammatical gender survives here; some 21st-century English speakers still use "it" with "child", see below).
The word , (which meant "female", ancestor of "wife" as in "fishwife"), is also neuter. ("Man") was grammatically male, but meant "a person", and could, like , be qualified with a gender. (variant , ancestor of "woman") meant "female person" and was grammatically masculine, like its last element, , and like (variant , "male person"). (weak source, but supports only the spelling variants given for clarity) Archbishop Ælfric's Latin vocabulary gives three Anglo-Saxon words for an intersex person, (dialectical "skratt", grammatically masculine), (grammatically feminine, like its last element, ), and (grammatically masculine).
Similarly, because is feminine, so are (inhabitants of a region), (inhabitants of heaven), and (inhabitants of hell). is neuter, feminine, and both mean "the Angles, the English people". Nouns for inanimate objects and abstract concepts also had (grammatical) genders. Mark Twain parodied this grammatical structure (which exists in many languages like German language) by rendering it literally into modern English:Deutscher 2005 pp. 41–42
About half of the world's languages have gender, and there is a continuum between those with more grammatical gender (based on word form, or quite arbitrary), and those with more natural gender (based on word meaning). The concept of natural gender was beginning to develop in Old English, occasionally conflicting with the established grammatical gender. This development was, however, mostly to take place later, in Middle English.
During the Middle English period, grammatical gender was gradually replaced with natural gender in English.
In Old English, a subject was not required in the way it is today. As the subject requirement developed, there was a need for something to fill it with verbs taking zero arguments. Weather verbs such as rain or thunder were of this type, and, as the following example shows, dummy it often took on this role.
Gif on sæternesdæg geðunrað, þaet tacnað demena and gerefena cwealmBut these were not the only such verbs. Most of the verbs used without a subject or with the dummy it belong to one of the following semantic groups:If on saturn's-day thunders, that portends judges' and sheriffs' death
If it thunders on Saturday, that portends the deaths of judges and sheriffs
And examples still remain, such as the expression suffice it to say.
The same use of dummy it exists in Cleft sentence, such as it's obvious that you were there.
It is usually Definiteness and specific, but it can also have no referent at all (See Dummy it). It can be debatable whether a particular use is a dummy it or not (for instance: "Who is it?"—"It's me!").
Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed using it in a wider sense in all the situations where a gender-neutral pronoun might be desired:
The children's author E. Nesbit consistently wrote in this manner, often of mixed groups of children: "Everyone got its legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage." Five Children and It, p. 1. This usage (but in all caps, as if an acronym) also occurs in District of Columbia police reports.
Some people use it as a gender-neutral pronoun.
| + !Form !IPA !Recording | ||
| it | /ɪt/ | |
| its | /ɪts/ | |
| itself | (British English)/ɪtˈsɛlf/ (American English)/ᵻtˈsɛlf/ |
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