They/them

It is also the most often misdated set in English. No source traced for this entry gives a year for the first singular use, only a century, and the dates firmly attached to the pronoun belong to writers using it, and none to whoever used it first.

How they and them work in a sentence

The five forms are the same as those of plural they, which is why the paradigm lies against She/her and He/him cell for cell. The reflexive is the only cell carrying an argument, and both spellings are in current use.

Merriam-Webster's own examples cover the range. No one has to go if they don't want to takes an indefinite antecedent. If someone calls, tell them I'll be back soon takes an unknown one. The winner will have their artwork placed on display at the U.S. Capitol is a real sentence from Zach Nunn, and I do not believe there is an artist in history who hasn't asked themself, at least once, why do I do this is Mary Gabriel, using the disputed reflexive.

The verb stays plural whatever the antecedent. Merriam-Webster's usage article puts it plainly: the natural form is they are my friend, never they is my friend. The dictionary sets the case beside the second-person pronoun, which was a plural form before it became a singular one, and which kept its plural verb after the eighteenth century gave up the attempt to inflect it by number.

Why the origin of they is disputed

The standard account has they, their and them entering English from Old Norse in the thirteenth century, displacing the native Old English plural forms. Marcelle Cole's The Early History of they, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2026, argues the opposite: that the pronouns descend from the Old English demonstratives thā, thāra and thām, and that contact with Old Norse reinforced a development already under way in the northern and south-western dialects and did not introduce it. Cole, who teaches English historical linguistics at Utrecht University, rests the case on the largest quantitative survey of third-person plural pronoun usage in early English so far published, and on evidence of morphological and phonological continuity from Old to Middle English.

One account makes the commonest pronoun in the language a borrowing, the other makes it native.

Where the earliest singular they is recorded

Wikipedia places the singular use in fourteenth-century Middle English and notes that it is slightly the younger of the two. That is a century rather than a year, and it is where most published accounts of the pronoun acquire a precision they cannot support.

What the record does fix is who was using it afterwards. The school grammar that Baskervill and Sewell published in 1895 collects examples from recognised authors: Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, 1814, on anybody in their senses, and Byron in Werner, 1823, on every one judging according to their own feelings. Merriam-Webster adds Shakespeare, Montgomery, Alcott and Coates to the same list.

Baskervill and Sewell recorded the usage and then advised against it, preferring generic he on the grounds of number agreement. That is the shape of the entire nineteenth-century record: the pronoun sits in the citations and the prohibition sits in the commentary above them.

How grammarians tried to replace they with he

The earliest explicit recommendation traced for this entry is Ann Fisher's A New Grammar, from the middle of the eighteenth century, asserting that the masculine person answers to the general name, covering male and female alike. Nineteenth-century grammarians took the same line and dismissed he or she as clumsy.

It reached statute. An act of the British Parliament of 1850 laid down that words importing the masculine gender, where they appeared in legislation, were to be deemed and taken to include females.

Whether agreement was ever the real reason has been argued, and the Wikipedia article sets two earlier remarks beside the grammarians. Wilson's The arte of Rhetorique, of 1560, advises keeping a natural order and setting the man before the woman for manners' sake. Poole's The English Accidence, of 1646, states that the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine; the article cites Poole through Bodine.

The prescription did not take. Jürgen Gerner published a study of the British National Corpus in 1998 in which singular they outnumbered generic he after indefinite pronouns like everybody and anybody, and did so in every social class, age band and region of the sample alike.

Why themself and themselves are still argued

The record for themself runs from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, after which, in Merriam-Webster's phrasing, it was all but eclipsed by themselves. Use of it has risen again from some point in the 1970s or 1980s onward, and it is still filed in places as a minority form.

Payne and Huddleston, in the Cambridge grammar of 2002, called its use in the standard dialect rare and acceptable only to a minority of speakers, and predicted in the same breath that it would spread as singular they did. The argument in its favour is that themselves reads as incongruous where one person is meant, which is the point of the line Fowler's takes from Ian Hislop in 1984, about a grotesque figure being not an actor pretending to be somebody but, in grotesque form, the person themself.

Institutions differ, and they differ in writing. For federal legislative drafting, the Canadian government asks for themselves and specifically advises against themself. Merriam-Webster prints both, illustrating themself from James Lewis Hoberman and from Mary Gabriel. Neither spelling is an error; they answer to different authorities, which is why the table above carries the pair.

Who uses they for a named person

Merriam-Webster separates the uses into four. One sense covers a singular indefinite pronoun antecedent, one an unknown or unspecified person, one a person whose gender is intentionally not revealed, and one a single person whose gender identity is non-binary. The last was added during the run-up to the dictionary's word of the year for 2019, and the entry was revised again in 2025.

The recognition is dated elsewhere too. The American Dialect Society picked they in this use as its 2015 word of the year, then in 2020 as the word of the preceding decade. By that year the American Psychological Association, the Associated Press, the Chicago Manual of Style and the British Council had all taken it as a personal pronoun, several of them having called it colloquial, and unsuited to formal prose, earlier in the same century.

The set and the identity are not the same thing. Writing in Them, Wren Sanders argues that Merriam-Webster's non-binary sense, while a fair record of one use, is misleading as a definition: many Non-binary people use they and many do not, and some people who are not non-binary do. Sanders quotes the writer Ashleigh Shackelford, who uses she and they, describing the choice of she as inseparable from a Black girlhood and womanhood that had been denied her, and questioning what neutrality is supposed to mean in a language whose defaults are not neutral. Sanders also names the New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo, who is not non-binary and asked in an opinion piece to be referred to as they in public.