Ey/em

How ey and em decline

Elverson made all three core forms the same way, by taking the th off they, them and their, which is why the paradigm looks familiar to a reader who has never seen it before.

Ey rhymes with the letter a and is a homophone of it, which is the one thing about the set that has to be learned rather than guessed. The Chicago Tribune's report of the contest on 23 August 1975 used the pronouns in its own copy: a person's sentences would sound smoother since ey would not clutter them with the old pronouns, and if ey tripped up in the new usage, ey would have only emself to blame.

The original ey has been argued to be preferable to e, which is the shorter variant, on the ground that e is pronounced the same as he in any position where he, him and his lose their h.

Where the ey set was coined

The Chicago Association of Business Communicators ran a contest to find replacements for she and he, him and her, his and hers. Christine M. Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, won it in 1975 with ey, em and eir. Judie Black reported the result in the Chicago Tribune on 23 August that year, on page 12 of section one, and closed the piece with a rival entry: a contestant from California who proposed uh, on the reasoning that a person who is not a he or a she is uh, something else. Black signed off by calling that so much of eir humour.

The competition had a specific audience. It was run by an association of business communicators for the practical problem of writing about an unnamed employee.

Which variants the record separates

The history is unusually tangled because the pronouns appear to have been created independently more than once. Wikipedia separates three variants as being in current use, plus a fourth from a novel, and the differences between them are small enough to matter.

The earliest is an editorial by James Rogers from January 1890, which derived e, es and em from he and them in answer to the rival proposal thon. The Scottish novelist David Lindsay arrived at ae and aer independently in A Voyage to Arcturus, using them for beings he described as unmistakably of a third positive sex.

Two proposals landed in 1977. The poet and linguist Lillian Carlton wrote to the journal American Speech to argue against a set built on the long e sound, invented by an American professor Wikipedia identifies as probably Donald MacKay, on two grounds: said quickly it comes close to the non-standard hisself, and ee sounds too much like he. Her own preference was for the existing word one. In the same year Jeffery J. Smith, an emeritus professor of philosophy and humanities at Stanford University writing as Tintajl jefry, proposed em as a personal noun-pronoun carrying no indication of sex, age or number, and extended it to forms of address as well.

MacKay's sets reached print in American Psychologist in May 1980, in a study measuring how often readers misread the gender of a person in textbook paragraphs written with he meaning he or she, against three epicene alternatives.

How Spivak gave the set its name

Michael Spivak, an American mathematician, wrote the AMS-TeX manual The Joy of TeX in 1983 using E, Em and Eir. His forms were Elverson's with the capitalisation of one of MacKay's sets, and the book carried them to a readership of mathematicians and typesetters. The name attached to the pronouns from there.

Spivak did not coin them and the record does not claim he did. Wikipedia's own article carries a maintenance notice, added in September 2024, asking for more citations, and describes the precise history as unclear.

How LambdaMOO put the pronouns in software

In May 1991 a programmer named Roger Crew added spivak as a gender setting for players on LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual world. Setting it made the game engine refer to a player as e, em, eir, eirs and emself. Crew added it alongside several other invented gender settings in order to test changes to the software's pronoun code, and left it in as a novelty.

To Crew's surprise the spivak setting caught on among the players while the others were mostly ignored. A pronoun set moved from a printed proposal into working code, and the code then produced sentences whether or not anyone had learned the paradigm. On LambdaMOO the forms became standard practice in help texts, in references to a guest whose gender was unknown, and in references to a person whose gender was known but not being disclosed. Wikipedia records that this usage has been declining since 2000, and marks that sentence as needing a citation.

Spivak is one of the selectable genders on many multi-user dungeons and MOOs, beside options such as neuter, either, both, plural, royal and second. Wikipedia notes that a virtual community is sometimes where a person first encounters genderless pronouns, and sometimes where they first experiment with presenting themselves in a Genderqueer or Transgender way. Nomic games, which are played by amending their own rules, use the set in their rulesets to refer to an indefinite player.

Where ey has been used since

The Elverson forms were revived by writers applying the original th-dropping rule rather than by anyone following Elverson. Eric Klein used them in the legal code he wrote for Oceania, a planned micronation, in 1993. John Williams's Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ of 2004 promoted the Elverson set, reaching it through Klein, in preference to the other contenders then circulating on Usenet.

Wiktionary's dated citations are thinner than the publication list. It carries the Chicago Tribune piece of 1975, a message to the newsgroup alt.yoga of 22 December 1996, and one to alt.cellular of 25 November 1997 in which a mobile user pays a long-distance fee for a call carried from eir home area. The pronoun sense was taken to Wiktionary's request-for-verification process in October 2011 and passed, on the strength of the books Wikipedia lists; other senses of the same spelling, an island and a state of fear, were taken there later and failed.

The books divide by variant. The Elverson forms appear in Eric Klein's Laws of Oceania, in R. J. Edwards's webcomic Riot Nrrd between 2009 and 2014, and in a 2011 novel by C. J. Carter. The LambdaMOO forms appear in Steven Shaviro's Doom Patrols of 1997, Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life of 1999, Jane Love's 2000 essay on writing centre pedagogy, Elizabeth Hess's Yib's Guide to MOOing of 2003, Sue Thomas's Hello World of 2004, the shared-universe project Orion's Arm, Ann Leckie's novel Provenance of 2017, and Maia Kobabe's memoir Gender Queer of 2019. Four of those eight are about virtual worlds.