Fae/faer
Fae is a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun that shares its spelling with an English word for the fairy folk. Wiktionary carries it on the same page as that noun and as the adjective meaning magical or fairylike, marks the pronoun rare, nonstandard and a neologism, and gives no dated use of it earlier than 22 September 2016. Who proposed the set, in what year and in what post is recorded nowhere in the material gathered for this entry.
What the record holds for Fae/faer
First documented
2016
Wiktionary's earliest dated quotation for the pronoun is Kim Zarzour's Language Matters in the Parkdale Villager of 22 September 2016, page 15. No source gathered for this entry names a coiner, a coinage year or a first post, and Wiktionary gives the pronoun no etymology beyond the spelling it shares with the noun.
Coined by
Not on record. The word is in use with no traceable author, which is the ordinary case for vocabulary that grew inside a community rather than being announced.
How common
Not measured
How fae and faer decline
The paradigm is regular and short, and one cell in it rests on weaker evidence than the rest.
| Subject | Object | Possessive determiner | Possessive pronoun | Reflexive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fae | faer | faer | faers | faerself |
Faer does double duty as object and possessive, in the way her does. The three quotations Wiktionary prints cover the subject, the object, the possessive determiner and the reflexive between them. The standalone possessive faers is not in any of them, and it is carried only by the form in which the set is conventionally written out, fae, faer, faers.
Where the fae pronoun is first recorded
The earliest of Wiktionary's dated quotations is journalism. Kim Zarzour's piece Language Matters, in the Parkdale Villager of Parkdale, Toronto, on 22 September 2016, page 15, describes a person named Vandikas whose mother once asked faer to explain how fae would like her to talk about faer. Fae was encouraged, the article reports, but the mother's use of the pronouns did not last. The passage is about a family adjusting rather than about the word, and Zarzour uses the forms in running prose without glossing them.
The other two quotations are books, both from 2022. Novae Caelum's science fiction novel The Truthspoken Heir uses fae and faerself of a character who has decked faerself in cheap jewellery. Sherry Paris's workbook for young activists uses fae and faer on page 24, of a person called Soul who wrote a poem for a college application. Wiktionary points to a longer citations page for the word, which was not gathered here.
Why nobody has dated the coinage
The material assembled for this entry holds no coinage record at all. Wiktionary gives the pronoun no etymology of its own beyond the spelling it shares with the noun, names nobody, and reaches no further back than 2016. The two community sources on file do not document it either, because both of them are about a different word.
What is missing is a first post, a name and a year, the three facts this catalogue prints for a deliberate coinage. What is present is a working paradigm, three dated uses in print between 2016 and 2022, and a dictionary label.
The one general claim on file about how far the set has travelled is a reader comment rather than a source. Under Mark Liberman's Language Log post of 14 December 2021, a commenter named Michael Hicks called fae the most common of the noun-self pronouns, meaning the class of neopronouns adapted from existing words, and set it against sets such as ze and zir or xe and xem, which keep the shape of a pronoun and change the sound. Nothing on file measures that, and a comment thread is where the claim stops.
How fae differs from genderfae
Three of the five sources gathered for this entry turned out to be about Genderfae, which is an identity label rather than a pronoun set. Genderfae names a gender that moves among feminine, neutral and unaligned experiences without reaching the masculine, and the Nonbinary Wiki records it as an anonymous submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog in 2014. The counts that wiki publishes, twelve respondents to the 2019 Gender Census and 53 in 2020, count people who gave that identity label and say nothing about the pronoun.
Christina Gleason, quoted in the Language Log post, holds the two apart in a single sentence. Some people who are fae use fae and faer as their pronouns; Gleason keeps the she and her pronouns she has used all her life, and makes a joke of it by giving them as sidhe and her, sidhe being an older Irish spelling of the word for the fairy folk and pronounced the same as she. The modern Irish spelling is sí, and the source of the joke says outright that the older form makes the better one, which is why it is the older form Gleason gives.
What fae means apart from the pronoun
Wiktionary's other English senses of the spelling are an adjective and a noun, both alternative spellings of fey: magical or fairylike, and the fairy folk. Its dated quotation for the noun comes from a 2024 Dover Publications colouring book of dragons, warriors and fae.
Wikipedia's disambiguation page for the same three letters runs to a dozen unrelated things, among them a sonata by Schumann, Brahms and Dietrich, the airport code for Vágar in the Faroe Islands, the fundamental attribution error in social psychology and the Ecuadorian Air Force. The pronoun is not listed on it. Under the Language Log post, Bob Ladd added a reading from Scotland: in Scots, fae means from, and a line beginning with it reads as the opening of a place name.
Told apart
Often confused with Fae/faer
Common questions
Questions about Fae/faer
- How is fae used in a sentence?
- Fae fills the subject slot, faer fills both the object slot and the possessive, and faerself is the reflexive. The 2016 newspaper quotation runs the forms together: faer mother once asked faer to explain how fae would like her to talk about faer.
- Who coined fae/faer?
- No source gathered for this entry says. Wiktionary gives the pronoun no coiner, no coinage date and no etymology beyond the spelling it shares with the noun meaning fairy folk, and the two community pages on file document a different word. The earliest evidence of any kind is a use in print from 2016, which is a date of circulation rather than a date of invention.
- Is fae the same as genderfae?
- No. Fae and faer are pronouns, which do grammatical work and assert nothing about anybody's gender. Genderfae is an identity label for a gender that moves among feminine, neutral and unaligned experiences and never reaches the masculine, recorded as an anonymous submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog in 2014. Christina Gleason, quoted on Language Log, describes herself as fae while keeping she and her pronouns, which is the clearest demonstration that the two are separable.
- When was fae first used in print?
- The earliest dated use on file is 22 September 2016, in Kim Zarzour's article Language Matters in the Parkdale Villager, page 15. Wiktionary's two other quotations are books published in 2022.
- What is a noun-self pronoun?
- A neopronoun adapted from an existing word rather than built to rhyme with an existing pronoun. The description comes from a comment by Michael Hicks under a Language Log post of 14 December 2021, which sets the class against sets like ze and zir or xe and xem that keep the shape of a pronoun and change only its sound.
Added 2026-08-30 · Revised 2026-09-07
The evidence behind the word
How thoroughly Fae/faer has been counted
Not how common the word is. How much of a population anybody has actually measured it across, on a six-step scale where each step is defined by the kind of evidence it takes to reach it, never by a score. The full method.
Not measured (umbrella/descriptor)
Fae/faer sits outside the six steps. Institutional descriptor or umbrella concept not used as a self-identification label in surveys. There is nothing for a survey to count, which is a fact about the word rather than about how many people it fits.
Gender Census and USTS are self-selected community samples (shares of the gender-diverse community, multi-select, checkbox lists change yearly), not population prevalence. Only Williams Institute and Ipsos provide general-population estimates. Culture-specific figures mix census counts, academic studies, and advocacy estimates - each row cites its source.
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- GenderfaeA fluid gender bounded so that it never reaches the masculine, an anonymous 2014 coinage, and the community objection that produced genderdoe and genderthil.
- 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.
- 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.
