He/him

The forms themselves have been still for a long time. He, him, his and himself had settled into their present shape by the fifteenth century and have not moved since, which is why almost everything worth dating about the set is about the second job it was given rather than the first one it did.

How him and his divide the cases

Wikipedia counts four shapes carrying five word forms: he is the nominative, him the accusative, his serves as both the dependent and the independent genitive, and himself is the reflexive. The doubling falls in a different place from the one in She/her, where the shared shape is the object and the determiner rather than the two possessives.

The article's examples put each form in position: He's there as subject, I saw him as object, The only person there was him as predicative complement, I met his friend as dependent determiner, This is his as independent, He did it himself as adjunct, and the rare modifier use in The he goat was missing. Merriam-Webster carries the noun as well, glossed as a male person or animal, and a second noun sense for something with strong masculine appeal, which it illustrates from Sinclair Lewis calling something he-literature.

Wikipedia adds the dependents, which pronouns rarely take and this one does: a relative clause in he who arrives late, an adjective phrase in the real him, and an adverb phrase in not even him. Merriam-Webster's page for the spelling then runs on into four headwords that have nothing to do with the pronoun at all: the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the chemical symbol for helium, and the abbreviation standing for Her or His Excellency, high efficiency, high explosive and His Eminence.

How he came to be the only masculine pronoun

Old English had one third-person pronoun, descended from a Proto-Germanic demonstrative base and ultimately from an Indo-European root meaning this, and it carried three genders in the singular as well as a plural. Its masculine forms were hē in the nominative, hine in the accusative, him in the dative and his in the genitive, and the dative is where the modern object form comes from rather than the accusative.

The system came apart in stages. In the twelfth century the neuter began to separate, appearing without its h and becoming it, and around the same time one case dropped out. The -self forms grew in early Middle English, where hine self became himself. By the fifteenth century the paradigm had solidified into the modern one. The feminine and the neuter had split away by then, leaving he as the only masculine pronoun in the language, which is the position it still holds.

Where the generic he was first recommended

The earliest explicit recommendation traced for this entry is Ann Fisher's A New Grammar, from the middle of the eighteenth century, which states that the masculine person answers to the general name, comprehending both male and female, and gives as its example any person who knows what he says. The grammarians who followed argued from number agreement: they was plural and the antecedent was singular, and he or she was rejected as clumsy.

The rule was adopted well beyond the schoolroom. In 1850 the British Parliament passed an act providing that words importing the masculine gender, used in acts of Parliament, were to be deemed and taken to include females. Writers followed it in print. Baskervill and Sewell's grammar of 1895 quotes Thackeray's On Lett's Diary of 1869, on every person who turns the page having his own little diary, and George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days of 1879, on it being any one's own fault if he did not know.

Why the generic he was defended

Number agreement was the stated reason, and it was the reason the grammars gave. Wikipedia records a competing account of the motive, that the promotion of a generic he rested on an androcentric world view in which the default person was male, and it puts two earlier remarks in evidence. Wilson's The arte of Rhetorique of 1560 advises keeping a natural order and setting the man before the woman for manners' sake, and adds that the worthier is preferred and set before, as a man is set before a woman. Poole's The English Accidence of 1646 states that the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine; the article takes Poole from Bodine.

The two accounts of the motive are not reconciled anywhere in the sources traced for this entry, and the second is reported there as an argument rather than as a finding.

When style guides stopped prescribing he

Wikipedia puts the end of general acceptability at the 1960s, and notes that particular uses had drawn ridicule before that. C. C. Fries is quoted on an ideal that every boy and girl should be so equipped that he shall not be handicapped, a sentence whose antecedent defeats the rule outright. The article's own test cases do the same: a sentence about somebody giving birth, or about whichever of two parents wishes to discuss something, will not take him without sounding wrong.

Merriam-Webster's usage guide states the modern position without hedging. Everyone should bring his own pencil is not acceptable to the modern speaker unless the person referred to is known to be male; his or her was formerly recommended in its place and was widely disliked. The dictionary makes the same judgement about the other gendered set in the same breath, since telling somebody that a caller said she would ring back is no more acceptable where the caller is unknown. What it recommends instead is they, them and their, which it says have done the job for centuries.

The institutional turn is datable. By 2020 most style guides had accepted singular they as a personal pronoun, the American Psychological Association, the Associated Press, the Chicago Manual of Style and the British Council among them, several of them having described it earlier in the same century as colloquial and unsuited to formal writing.

Where he is now written beside a name

The set also appears as a statement rather than an assumption. The Trevor Project's 2022 national survey, a document about something else entirely and drawn from nearly thirty-four thousand young people, prints its contributors with their pronouns attached to their names: the chief executive as Amit Paley, he and him, and a senior research scientist as Myeshia Price, she and her or they and them. The second of those records a person stating two sets rather than one.

Merriam-Webster's first sense remains the ordinary one, that male one who is neither speaker nor hearer, and it covers the common case of a Man being referred to in the third person. A separate convention capitalises the pronoun in religious writing, where some Christians write He, His and Him of God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, and some translations of the Bible follow suit. The same convention is applied to She where a deity is regarded as female, which is one of the few places in modern English where the choice between the two sets is made deliberately and marked in the typography.