Pronouns
Pronouns · 9 entries
A pronoun entry leads with the table, because the table is what a reader came for. Every set is given in all five forms, subject, object, possessive determiner, possessive pronoun and reflexive, with sentences showing each form in use, since a paradigm without sentences leaves somebody still unsure how to write a note to a colleague. The entries record where a set was first attested rather than assuming it is new, and several are considerably older than the argument about them.
Pronouns are not identities and the catalogue keeps them apart. A person of any gender may use any set, sets change, and asking which pronouns somebody uses is a different question from asking what their gender is. Where a set is contested in usage rather than in principle, the entry says who objects and on what grounds, and where a dictionary or a style guide has taken a position, it says which and when.
Of this kind
All 9 pronouns
9 entries
- 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.
- Fae/faerFae, faer, faers, faerself: a noun-self pronoun with three dated uses between 2016 and 2022, and no record at all of who proposed it or when.
- 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.
- She/herThe only English pronoun with no agreed etymology: her covers two cases, and the descent of she from Old English has never been satisfactorily settled.
- They/themSingular they is dated to the fourteenth century rather than the twenty-first, and its reflexive cell still holds two spellings that authorities split over.
- ThonCoined in 1858 from a Scots demonstrative, printed by its inventor in 1884, and carried by Merriam-Webster from 1934 until it was dropped in 1961.
- Xe/xemXe, xem, xyr and xemself: the set printed in UU World on 1 May 1973 and credited to Don Rickter, plus the xyr against xir spelling nobody settled.
- Ze/hirZe, hir, hirs and hirself, with the zir variant beside them, and the century-wide gap between the OED dating of 1864 and Dictionary.com's 1970s.
Keep going
The other kinds of term
- Gender IdentitiesWhat a person is, as against how they present. Every identity term in the catalogue, with the record behind it.53
- Culture-Specific GendersRoles belonging to particular peoples, recorded on their own terms rather than as versions of a Western category.41
- Gender ExpressionPresentation, not identity. The distinction that most confused searches about this vocabulary are about.11
- Concepts and TerminologyThe words that appear inside the definitions of other words, with their defining documents named.8
Common questions
Questions about pronouns
Which pronouns are there besides he and she?
Singular they is the most used by a wide margin and has been in written English since the fourteenth century. Beyond it sit coined sets, sometimes called neopronouns, of which ze and hir are the most attested, and noun-self sets drawn from ordinary vocabulary. Each entry gives the full declension and worked sentences.
Is singular they grammatically correct?
It has been in written English for six centuries, several hundred years before anybody objected to it. What changed recently is its use for a specific known person rather than an unspecified one, and that use now appears in major dictionaries with a dated entry, which the pronoun entries record.
Do pronouns reveal somebody's gender?
Not reliably, and the catalogue files them apart from identity for that reason. A person of any gender may use any set, some people use more than one, and some use different sets in different settings. The pronoun is a fact about how somebody wishes to be referred to, which is not the same fact as their identity.
What is a neopronoun?
A set coined deliberately rather than inherited from the language. They are older than the internet: several nineteenth-century sets were printed in dictionaries for decades. What the recent ones share with those is the same problem and the same solution, roughly a century and a half apart, and the entries date each coinage where a source allows it.