Pronouns & Forms of Address
Pronouns & Forms of Address · 13 entries
The words in this group do not name a kind of person. They do grammatical work. A pronoun set stands in for somebody in a sentence and a form of address goes in front of a name, and neither one asserts anything about what gender is, which is what separates this page from every other category in the catalogue. The rest are filed by a claim their sources make about meaning; these are filed by what the word does.
Every set is printed with its full declension, because the question a reader arrives with is almost always about a form rather than about the set: the object form, the possessive, the reflexive that has two accepted spellings and an argument attached to each. Where the earliest record is disputed, the entry prints the competing dates and says who gives each, and where a set was proposed by one person on one day, it says so and names them. That is the same treatment the rest of the catalogue gives a coinage, applied to the part of the vocabulary where dates are quoted most often and checked least. The forms of address sit here for the same reason: a title is a grammatical slot too, and it belongs beside the pronouns rather than among the identities, where it would be filed as a name for a kind of person that it is not.
In this category
All 13 pronouns & forms of address
13 entries
- Ey/emEy, em, eir, eirs, emself: coined by Christine Elverson in 1975, named after Michael Spivak, and put into working code on LambdaMOO in 1991.
- Fae/faerFae, faer, faers, faerself: a noun-self pronoun with three dated uses between 2016 and 2022, and no record at all of who proposed it or when.
- He/himPrescribed for everybody from the eighteenth century until the 1960s, written into an act of Parliament in 1850, and dropped by the style guides by 2020.
- It/itsThree shapes for five forms, a paradigm settled by the seventeenth century, and one modern use that the reference record barely documents at all.
- MxThe courtesy title that states no gender. Dated to 1977 by the OED, accepted on council forms in Brighton and Hove in 2013, and argued over since.
- NeopronounThird-person pronouns coined rather than inherited. The label dates from the 2010s; the sets it covers run back to 1789, and over two hundred are recorded.
- Nounself pronounA pronoun made from an ordinary noun: bun, buns, bunself. The first is dated to late 2013 on Tumblr; the label first appears in print three years later.
- Pronoun setThe five forms one pronoun takes, and why a set is named by the first two. The 2017 Gender Census asked for all five, one sentence at a time.
- She/herThe only English pronoun with no agreed etymology: her covers two cases, and the descent of she from Old English has never been satisfactorily settled.
- They/themSingular they is dated to the fourteenth century rather than the twenty-first, and its reflexive cell still holds two spellings that authorities split over.
- ThonCoined in 1858 from a Scots demonstrative, printed by its inventor in 1884, and carried by Merriam-Webster from 1934 until it was dropped in 1961.
- Xe/xemXe, xem, xyr and xemself: the set printed in UU World on 1 May 1973 and credited to Don Rickter, plus the xyr against xir spelling nobody settled.
- Ze/hirZe, hir, hirs and hirself, with the zir variant beside them, and the century-wide gap between the OED dating of 1864 and Dictionary.com's 1970s.
Keep going
The other categories
- Gender Around the WorldThis is the largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- Gender Expression & PresentationWhat these gender expression terms report is presentation, stance and the scene a person comes from, rather than an answer to the question of what their gender is. [[butch]] is the clearest case: Wikipedia files it inside the lesbian subculture, with its own traits, behaviours and styles, and the word grew out of working-class bar culture in the 1940s, not out of any theory of identity. [[genderpunk|Genderpunk]] and gender bending belong here for a related reason, since both describe an active stance against a norm.
- Trans & Binary IdentitiesMan, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth.
- Distinct Nonbinary GendersThe microlabels here share one insistence, and their sources make it in almost the same words every time: this is not a partial gender, not a blend, and not a point between two poles.
Common questions
Questions about pronouns & forms of address
What is a pronoun set?
The full group of forms one pronoun takes across its grammatical roles: subject, object, possessive determiner, possessive pronoun and reflexive. A set is named by its first two forms, so they/them names the set that continues their, theirs and themselves or themself, and quoting only the first two is a shorthand rather than the whole of it.
Why are pronouns filed apart from the gender terms?
Because a pronoun makes no claim about gender. Every other category in this catalogue is defined by something its sources say a word means, and a pronoun set means nothing of that kind: it is a slot in a sentence. Filing it beside the identities would say it names a kind of person, which is the confusion this page exists to keep out.
What counts as a neopronoun?
A pronoun set coined deliberately rather than inherited from the language, which covers both the sets proposed by named people on dated occasions and the ones assembled out of ordinary nouns. The line is about origin and not about age: some sets called new in current argument were first proposed in the nineteenth century.
Does this page say which pronouns to use for anybody?
No. The catalogue records what each set is, where it came from and what the record holds about its use, and it stops there. It gives no etiquette, no advice on asking and no position on any of the arguments, here or anywhere else on the site.
Why is a title filed with pronoun sets?
A form of address occupies a grammatical slot in front of a name in the same way a pronoun occupies one inside a sentence, and neither is a name for a kind of person. The titles also have the record this catalogue is built to print: a first attestation, a dictionary entry and, in one case, a dated decision by a government to accept it.