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Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun derived from plural they. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, to refer to an unknown person, or to refer to every person of some group, in sentences such as:
This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error. Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language. Some early-21st-century described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing. However, by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.
In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals emerged for non-binary people, as in, for example, "This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work." They in this context was named Word of the Year for 2015 by the American Dialect Society, and for 2019 by Merriam-Webster. In 2020, the American Dialect Society also selected it as Word of the Decade for the 2010s.
| + Inflected forms of third-person personal pronouns |
Themself is attested from the 14th to 16th centuries. Its use has been increasing since the 1970s or 1980s, though it is sometimes still classified as "a minority form". In 2002, Payne and Huddleston, in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, called its use in standard dialect "rare and acceptable only to a minority of speakers" but "likely to increase with the growing acceptance of they as a singular pronoun". It is useful when referring to a single person of indeterminate gender, where the plural form themselves might seem incongruous, as in:
Informal spoken English exhibits universal use of the singular they. An examination by Jürgen Gerner of the British National Corpus published in 1998 found that British speakers, regardless of social status, age, sex, or region, used the singular they more often than the gender-neutral he or other options in the context of being anaphors after indefinite pronouns like "everybody" and "anybody".
The earliest known explicit recommendation by a grammarian to use the generic he rather than they in formal English is Ann Fisher's mid-18th century A New Grammar assertion that "The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, any Person who knows what he says." (Ann Fisher as quoted by Ostade)
Nineteenth-century grammarians insisted on he as a gender-neutral pronoun on the grounds of number agreement, while rejecting "he or she" as clumsy, and this was widely adopted: e.g. in 1850, the British Parliament passed an act which provided that, when used in acts of Parliament "words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females". Baskervill and Sewell mention the common use of the singular they in their An English Grammar for the Use of High School, Academy and College Class of 1895, but prefer the generic he on the basis of number agreement.
Baskervill gives a number of examples of recognized authors using the singular they, including:
It has been argued that the real motivation for promoting the "generic" he was an androcentric world view, with the default sex of humans being male – and the default gender therefore being masculine. There is some evidence for this: Wilson wrote in 1560:
And Poole wrote in 1646:
In spite of continuous attempts on the part of educationalists to proscribe singular they in favour of he, this advice was ignored; even writers of the period continued to use they (though the proscription may have been observed more by American writers). Use of the purportedly gender-neutral he remained acceptable until at least the 1960s, though some uses of he were later criticized as being awkward or silly, for instance when referring to:
In some cases the antecedent may refer to persons who are only probably male or to occupations traditionally thought of as male:
In other situations, the antecedent may refer to an indeterminate person of either sex:
In 2010, Choy and Clark still recommend the use of generic he "in formal speech or writing":
In informal spoken English, plural pronouns are often used with indefinite pronoun antecedents. However, this construction is generally not considered appropriate in formal speech or writing.
In 2015, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage calls this "the now outmoded use of he to mean 'anyone, stating:
In 2016, Garner's Modern English calls the generic use of masculine pronouns "the traditional view, now widely assailed as sexist".
In 1808, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested it and which as neutral pronouns for the word person:
In the second half of the 20th century, people expressed more widespread concern at the use of male-oriented language. This included criticism of the use of man as a generic term to include men and women and of the use of he to refer to any human, regardless of sex (social gender).
It was argued that he could not sensibly be used as a generic pronoun understood to include men and women. William Safire in his On Language column in The New York Times approved of the use of generic he, mentioning the mnemonic phrase "the male embraces the female". C. Badendyck from Brooklyn wrote to the New York Times in a reply:
By 1980, the movement toward gender-neutral language had gained wide support, and many organizations, including most publishers, had issued guidelines on the use of gender-neutral language, but stopped short of recommending they to be third-person singular with a non-indeterminate, singular antecedent.
The increased use of singular they may owe in part to an increasing desire for gender-neutral language. A solution in formal writing has often been to write " he or she", or something similar, but this is often considered awkward or overly politically correct, particularly when used excessively. In 2016, the journal American Speech published a study by Darren K. LaScotte investigating the pronouns used by native English speakers in informal written responses to questions concerning a subject of unspecified gender, finding that 68% of study participants chose singular they to refer to such an antecedent. Some participants noted that they found constructions such as "he or she" inadequate as they do not include people who identify as neither male nor female.
They in this context was named Word of the Year for 2019 by Merriam-Webster and for 2015 by the American Dialect Society. On January 4, 2020, the American Dialect Society announced they had crowned they, again in this context, Word of the Decade for the 2010s.
There are examples where the antecedent pronoun (such as everyone) may refer to a collective, with no necessary implication of pairwise relationships. These are examples of plural they:
Which are apparent because they do not work with a generic he or he or she:
In addition, for these "notional plural" cases, it would not be appropriate to use themself instead of themselves as in:
Even when referring to a class of persons of known sex, they is sometimes used:
They may also be used with antecedents of mixed genders:
Even for a definite known person of known sex, they may be used in order to ignore or conceal the sex.
The word themself is also sometimes used when the antecedent is known or believed to be a single person.
A known individual may also be referred to as they if the individual is non-binary or genderqueer and considers they and derivatives as appropriate pronouns. Several social media applications permit account holders to choose to identify their gender using one of a variety of non-binary or genderqueer options, such as Gender fluidity, agender, or bigender, and to designate pronouns, including they/ them, which they wish to be used when referring to them. Explicitly designating one's pronouns as they/ them increases the chance that people will interpret "they" as singular. Though "singular they" has long been used with antecedents such as everybody or generic persons of unknown gender, this use, which may be chosen by an individual, is recent. The earliest recorded usage of this sense documented by the Oxford English Dictionary is in a tweet from 2009; the journal American Speech documents an example from 2008 in an article in the journal Women's Studies Quarterly. As of 2020, singular they is the most popular pronoun set used by non-binary people. Approximately 80% consider it appropriate for themselves.
The singular they in the meaning "gender-neutral singular pronoun for a known person, as a non-binary identifier" was chosen by the American Dialect Society as their "Word of the Year" for 2015. In 2016, the American Dialect Society wrote:
The vote followed the previous year's approval of this use by The Washington Post style guide, when Bill Walsh, the Posts copy editor, said that the singular they is "the only sensible solution to English's lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun".
In 2019, the non-binary they was added to Merriam-Webster's dictionary.
The first non-binary main character on North American television appeared on the Showtime drama series Billions in 2017, with Asia Kate Dillon playing Taylor Mason. Both actor and character use singular they.
that avoid expressing a preference for either approach sometimes recommend recasting a problem sentence, for instance replacing generic expressions with plurals to avoid the criticisms of either party.
Sources differ about whether singular they is more accepted in British or American English, with Garner's Modern English Usage stating British English and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language stating American English.
Garner suggests that use of singular they is more acceptable in British English:
and apparently regrets the resistance by the American language community:
He regards the trend toward using singular they with antecedents like everybody, anyone and somebody as inevitable:
Garner also notes that "resistance to the singular they is fast receding" in all national varieties of English.
However, this was revised in the 18th edition (2024):
APA style also endorses using if it is someone's (for example, a non-binary person's) preferred pronoun set.
The assessment, in 1979, was that:
In the 4th edition (2000), use of singular they was still proscribed against, but use of generic he was no longer recommended.
The second edition, Fowler's Modern English Usage (edited by Sir Ernest Gowers and published in 1965) continues to recommend use of the generic he; use of the singular they is called "the popular solution", which "sets the literary man's teeth on edge". It is stated that singular they is still disapproved of by grammarians but common in colloquial speech.
According to the third edition, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (edited by Robert Burchfield and published in 1996) singular they has not only been widely used by good writers for centuries, but is now generally accepted, except by some conservative grammarians, including the Fowler of 1926, who, it is argued, ignored the evidence:
The Complete Plain Words was originally written in 1948 by Ernest Gowers, a civil servant, in an attempt by the British civil service to improve "official English". A second edition, edited by Sir Bruce Fraser, was published in 1973. It refers to they or them as the "equivalent of a singular pronoun of common sex" as "common in speech and not unknown in serious writing " but "stigmatized by grammarians as usage grammatically indefensible. The book's advice for "official writers" (civil servants) is to avoid its use and not to be tempted by its "greater convenience", though "necessity may eventually force it into the category of accepted idiom".
A new edition of Plain Words, revised and updated by Gowers's great-granddaughter, Rebecca Gowers, was published in 2014. It notes that singular they and them have become much more widespread since Gowers' original comments, but still finds it "safer" to treat a sentence like 'The reader may toss their book aside' as incorrect "in formal English", while rejecting even more strongly sentences like
The Times Style and Usage Guide (first published in 2003 by The Times of London) recommends avoiding sentences like
by using a plural construction:
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004, Cambridge University Press) finds singular they "unremarkable":
It expresses several preferences.
The Economist Style Guide refers to the use of they in sentences like
as "scrambled syntax that people adopt because they cannot bring themselves to use a singular pronoun".
New Hart's Rules (Oxford University Press, 2012) is aimed at those engaged in copy editing, and the emphasis is on the formal elements of presentation including punctuation and typeface, rather than on linguistic style, although – like The Chicago Manual of Style – it makes occasional forays into matters of usage. It advises against use of the purportedly gender-neutral he, and suggests cautious use of they where he or she presents problems.
The 2011 edition of the New International Version Bible uses singular they instead of the traditional he when translating pronouns that apply to both genders in the original Greek or Hebrew. This decision was based on research by a commission that studied modern English usage and determined that singular they ( them/ their) was by far the most common way that English-language speakers and writers today refer back to singular antecedents such as whoever, anyone, somebody, a person, no one, and the like."
The British edition of The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, modified in some respects from the original US edition to conform to differences in culture and vocabulary, preserved the same recommendations, allowing singular they with semantically plural terms like "everyone" and indeterminate ones like "person", but recommending a rewrite to avoid.
Use of singular they is stated to be "particularly common", even "stylistically neutral" with antecedents such as everyone, someone, and no one, but more restricted when referring to common nouns as antecedents, as in
Use of the pronoun themself is described as being "rare" and "acceptable only to a minority of speakers", while use of the morphologically plural themselves is considered problematic when referring to someone rather than everyone (since only the latter implies a plural set).
There are also issues of grammatical acceptability when reflexive pronouns refer to singular noun phrases joined by or, the following all being problematic:
On the motivation for using singular they, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar states:
The alternative he or she can be "far too cumbersome", as in:
or even "flatly ungrammatical", as in
"Among younger speakers", use of singular they even with definite noun-phrase antecedents finds increasing acceptance, "sidestepping any presumption about the sex of the person referred to", as in:
It recommends using he or she or avoiding the problem by rewriting the sentence to use a plural or omit the pronoun.
According to notional agreement, in the Shakespeare quotation a mother is syntactically singular, but stands for all mothers; and in the Shaw quotation no man is syntactically singular (taking the singular form goes), but is semantically plural ( all go to not to be killed), hence idiomatically requiring they. Such use, which goes back a long way, includes examples where the sex is known, as in the above examples.
However, many languages, including English, show ambivalence in this regard. Because distribution also requires a group with more than one member, plural forms are sometimes used.This is an example.
In some sentences, typically those including words like every or any, the morphologically singular antecedent does not refer to a single entity but is "anaphorically linked" to the associated pronoun to indicate a set of pairwise relationships, as in the sentence:
Linguists like Steven Pinker and Rodney Huddleston explain sentences like this (and others) in terms of bound variables, a term borrowed from logic. Pinker prefers the terms quantifier and bound variable to antecedent and pronoun. He suggests that pronouns used as "variables" in this way are more appropriately regarded as of the equivalent referential pronouns.
The following shows different types of anaphoric reference, using various pronouns, including they:
On the other hand, when the pronoun they was used to refer to known individuals ("referential antecedents, for which the gender was presumably known", e.g. my nurse, that truck driver, a runner I knew), reading was slowed when compared with use of a gendered pronoun consistent with the "stereotypic gender" (e.g. he for a specific truck driver).
The study concluded that "the increased use of singular they is not problematic for the majority of readers".
A 2024 study by Arnold, Venkatesh, and Vig stated that two-thirds of people used an incorrect pronoun at least once in speaking about someone who used singular they, versus never when speaking about someone who used he or she, suggesting that singular they caused some difficulty, but the rate of errors was low (9%). They wrote that whereas people may repeat a name to avoid using the pronoun they in writing, in speech people used singular they at least as frequently as binary pronouns, "suggesting that any difficulty does not result in pronoun avoidance" in speech.
Singular "they" has also been compared to nosism (such as the "royal we"), when a single person uses first-person plural in place of first-person singular pronouns. Similar to singular "you", its singular reflexive pronoun ("") is different from the plural reflexive pronoun ("").
While the pronoun set derived from it is primarily used for inanimate objects, it is frequently used in an impersonal context when someone's identity is unknown or established on a provisional basis, e.g. "Who is it?" or "With this new haircut, no one knows it is me." It is also used for infants of unspecified gender but may be considered dehumanizing and is therefore more likely in a clinical context. Otherwise, in more personal contexts, the use of it to refer to a person might indicate antipathy or other negative emotions.
It can also be used for non-human animals of unspecified sex, though they is common for pets and other domesticated animals of unspecified sex, especially when referred to by a proper name (e.g. Rags, Snuggles). Normally, birds and mammals with a known sex are referred to by their respective male or female pronoun ( he and she; him and her).
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