Ze/hir

How ze and hir decline

The set has two accepted object stems, and the whole of the disagreement about it lives in that column.

Pronouns.org, which publishes a page for each set it covers, gives one worked paragraph for each spelling. In the hir version a person is a writer who wrote that book hirself, the ideas are hirs, and a reader likes both hir and hir ideas. In the zir version the same sentences run zirself, zirs and zir. The paradigm is otherwise identical, so a person using one is intelligible to a person expecting the other.

Wiktionary defines ze as a subject pronoun and carries the oblique forms in separate entries. The set is always cited as a pair for that reason: hir and zir are not built out of ze, and a reader who knows only the subject form cannot derive the rest of the paradigm from it.

Ze is pronounced with a long e and hir with the vowel of the English word here, which is the point at which the two halves of the set stop matching. The Oxford English Dictionary gives two pronunciations for the subject form, zee and zhee, in both British and American English.

Why the dictionaries disagree about ze

The Oxford English Dictionary treats ze as an English compound. Its etymons are the letter z, he and she; its earliest known use falls in the 1860s; its earliest evidence is from 1864, in the Ladies' Repository. OED puts the word at roughly 0.7 occurrences per million words in modern written English and its decade figures barely move across a century and a half, from 0.6 in 1860 to 0.63 in 2010.

Dictionary.com tells a different story in two lines. It records the word as American, gives zie as an alternative spelling, and dates the coinage to 1970 to 1975 on the model of the German pronoun sie. Its usage note places the wider practice earlier still, observing that gender-neutral pronouns were proposed as far back as the mid-1800s in connection with arguments about women's rights, and it explains the limited uptake of ze by pointing at the shape of the word class rather than at the word: pronouns are a small closed class whose membership is relatively fixed.

Wiktionary hedges hardest. Its pronoun sense carries the etymology possibly from Dutch zij, and nothing else.

None of the three names a person. What OED publishes without a subscription is a factsheet: the etymons, the earliest date, the pronunciations and the frequency table, with the definition and the quotation evidence held back. Dictionary.com gives a date range and a model language. Wiktionary gives a hedge. Where a coinage entry in this catalogue can usually print a name, a publication and a day, ze offers a periodical title, a year, and two later years that contradict it.

The two dated accounts are not strictly rivals, because a form can be coined more than once and the earlier one can be forgotten. What no source on file does is say so. Each prints its own date as the date, and a reader comparing them gets a gap of about a century with no bridge across it.

Why some writers prefer the zir forms

Pronouns.org gives the reason plainly: some people go by ze and zir rather than ze and hir because the spelling and the pronunciation are more consistent. Ze and zir share a letter and a sound; ze and hir share neither. The h-spelling makes the object form look like a variant of her, which is the association the set was built to avoid, and it has to be said with a different vowel from the subject form it belongs to.

Wiktionary's usage note names the community around the word rather than a coiner. The Genderqueer community is its primary proponent, and the note gives two conditions under which a speaker reaches for the set: when a person's gender is unknown and the speaker would rather not assume it, and when the person is neither male nor female, which leaves he, she and the either-or forms such as s/he unsuitable.

Pronouns.org also records that some people go by more than one set, or use different sets with different audiences, in the way a person may have a legal name, an everyday name and a working name. A pronoun set on that account is a piece of shared vocabulary rather than a fixed property of the person it refers to.

Pronouns.org adds a caution that runs the other way. A person who goes by ze may be a man, a woman, both, neither, or something else, because a pronoun is publicly shared language and a gender is not necessarily shared at all.

Where ze appears in published writing

Ze is unusual among the constructed pronouns in that its dated citations come from books. Wiktionary's earliest is Nearly Roadkill, a novel by Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein published by Serpent's Tail in June 1996; the pronoun appears on page 10, in a passage about knowing a person's sex and no longer being influenced by it. Bornstein used it again in My Gender Workbook, published by Routledge on 18 December 1997, on page 130, of a transgender model and actress. Leslie Feinberg used ze and hirs together in Drag King Dreams, published by Carroll and Graf on 22 March 2006, on page 205. Erika Lopez follows in 2010 and M. J. Locke in Up Against It, published by Tor on 15 March 2011, where a character's face is implacable while ze dashes away in tears.

Dictionary.com's harvested examples reach into journalism. It quotes the New York Times of 22 June 2023 on a play titled Hir, the Washington Post of 3 June 2022 on classroom teaching about pronouns, and Salon of 30 October 2021 on a person who graduated in 2007 and took a job ze called deadening.

What ze means outside the pronoun

Wiktionary carries three separate English etymologies for the spelling, and the pronoun is the second of them. The first is an eye-dialect spelling of the definite article, used to signal a foreign accent, usually French or German. Tristan Jones uses it that way in Adrift in 1992, and J. K. Rowling uses it throughout the Beauxbatons dialogue in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, published on 8 July 2000. Wiktionary lists the same three letters as a word in thirty-three other languages besides English, among them Albanian, where ze is a Gheg dialect noun meaning soul, and Aukan, where it means the sea and descends from the Dutch zee.

That crowding shows up in the automated evidence. Two of the five real-world examples Dictionary.com prints under its pronoun entry are the article sense rather than the pronoun: a Verge piece of 25 July 2021 about copyright takedowns, and a passage from Tae Keller's novel in which a character insists that ze bones must grow. The dictionary defines one word and illustrates it with two.