The following article was originally published in Copyediting newsletter, October–November 2012

Gender-neutral language can sometimes be a problem for writers and editors, and one of the most seemingly intractable issues is the question of gender-neutral pronouns. It is often lamented that English lacks a suitable gender-neutral pronoun, and many have tried over the years to coin something to fill the gap (at one of my former jobs, we facetiously used werf), but so far none have succeeded. For many years the standard solution was to simply use forms of he to refer to either men or women, as in Someone left his book on the desk, but this has fallen out of favor over the past several decades with the rise of feminism and the push for gender equality. Whatever your feelings on the supposedly gender-neutral he, its decline has once again left an unfortunate gap in the language.

Some argue that the best solution is to use singular they, which is already common in speech. But writers are frequently cautioned against using it, and editors are typically instructed to remove it. The usual advice is to replace a singular they with the conjoined he or she or to recast the sentence with a plural noun for they to refer to. Thus Will everyone please take their seats becomes Will everyone please take his or her seat, or A person should brush their teeth at least twice a day becomes People should brush their teeth at least twice a day.

The problem is that he or she can quickly become tiresome if overused, as in If a student wishes to change his or her schedule, he or she must present his or her photo ID at the registration office, and recasting a sentence as a plural doesn’t work when the subject must be singular, as in Someone left their book on the desk. While you can change the first to Students who wish to change their schedules must present their photo IDs at the registration office, you simply can’t say Some people left their book on the desk without unacceptably altering the meaning.

Increasingly, though, authorities are starting to accept singular they in print, though there’s still a great deal of resistance to it. The American Heritage Dictionary notes that singular they “is widespread and can be found in newspapers, magazines, and other edited publications.” A growing minority of the dictionary’s usage panel accepts singular they when referring to genderless nouns, and a majority now accepts it when referring to indefinite pronouns such as anyone and everyone. As New York Times associate managing editor for standards Philip B. Corbett said, “There’s a growing tendency to accept ‘they’ or ‘their’ to refer to an indefinite or singular antecedent, and this solution seems likely to win out eventually.” Perplexingly, though, Corbett recommends avoiding it until that unspecified time. If its acceptance is growing and inevitable, why avoid it? And how are we supposed to know when it’s finally OK to use it?

The real problem with most of the recommendations against using singular they is that they get some basic facts about grammar and the history of the English language wrong. First, they treat it as a relatively recent innovation that is infiltrating written language from spoken language. Second, they claim that it’s simply ungrammatical to use a plural pronoun to refer to something grammatically singular. I’ll show why both of these arguments are wrong, or at least not as strong as some would like to think.

But first, a little background. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, the phenomenon commonly known as singular they is actually two closely related phenomena. One is common-gender use, and the other is common-number use. The common-gender use is more frequent and garners the most attention. This is the use of they for singular referents whose gender is unknown or unspecified. The common-number they is used with referents that are grammatically singular but stand in for whole groups, as in these lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

’Tis meet that some more audience than a mother,

Since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear

The speech, of vantage.

Here the plural pronoun them refers grammatically to a mother, but it really means “mothers.” You could make the pronoun agree by changing it to her, but Polonius means that nature makes all mothers partial, not just Gertrude. Since the common-number they doesn’t draw much attention, I’ll focus on the common-gender use, though I’ll continue to use “singular they” as a blanket term.

History

As the Shakespeare quote shows, singular they is not a modern innovation or a mere product of the feminist movement. The Oxford English Dictionary, “the definitive record of the English language,” has examples of singular they dating back to 1526. It’s found in the King James Version of the Bible and the works of not just Shakespeare but also Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Edith Wharton, and W. H. Auden.

A common response to this evidence is that these literary greats knew the rules well enough to know when to break them. Another response is that everyone makes mistakes and that use by even the best writers isn’t enough to make it acceptable. But these responses start from the assumption that singular they is an error in an attempt to justify continued opposition to it. Like so many rules, however, the one proscribing singular they comes to us from 18th-century grammarians who were attempting to standardize the English language on a Latin model. In this way, the ban on singular they belongs in the same category as the bans on split infinitives and stranded prepositions.

It was the American grammarian Lindley Murray who first attacked singular they and prescribed generic he, and others soon picked up the attack. (Even 200 years ago, people found he or she clunky and inelegant.) An 1850 Act of Parliament even legally prescribed generic he over he or she or they. By the 20th century, singular they had been mostly driven out of the written language, though of course it survived all this time in speech. And as the names listed earlier show, some writers blissfully ignored the stricture against singular they and carried on using it anyway. Simply put, Shakespeare didn’t break this rule because he had mastered it; the rule hadn’t been invented yet. For Shakespeare and many others, there was no reason to avoid singular they because it wasn’t wrong.

But why did speakers start using singular they in the first place? Because it fills an important niche. Having a gender-neutral singular pronoun is very handy, and it’s difficult to create a new pronoun out of thin air. Anyone can coin a new noun or verb, but pronouns are what linguists often call a closed class—they don’t typically admit new members. In fact, the most recent additions to the personal pronouns are she and they, which replaced the original Old English pronouns heo and hie, respectively, in the 12th and 13th centuries, and its, which replaced the original neuter genitive form his in the 16th century. As the case system of Old English started to disappear, heo and hie started to sound almost identical to he, which could have caused a great deal of confusion. In response, speakers borrowed they from Old Norse speakers who had settled along the northeast coast of England. Its was coined because speakers began to feel uncomfortable using his for both masculine and genitive objects. It’s still a bit of a mystery where she came from.

Singular they came in response to a similar need. As English lost its grammatical genders, speakers began to use a system of natural gender instead. The gender-neutral it began to be seen as dehumanizing, leaving the infamous gap. He and she were both gender-specific, and the conjoined he or she has always been clunky. They, however, was already gender-neutral without being dehumanizing, and it was even a third-person pronoun. And as I’ll show later, the grammatical number mismatch isn’t as big a deal as some have made it out to be.

Historical usage can only tell us so much, though. After all, language is always changing, and what was correct centuries ago may not be correct today. Some have expressed concern that acceptance of singular they will be the beginning of the end of numerical agreement in English, but I firmly believe that this concern is misplaced.

Grammar

The biggest objection to singular they is that it’s ungrammatical—a plural pronoun simply doesn’t agree with a singular antecedent, right? If we accept one grammatical mismatch, where do we draw the line? Fortunately, it’s not as simple as that. There’s another plural personal pronoun that English has used as a singular for centuries: you. It started life as a plural, contrasting with singular thou, but it began to be used as a formal singular pronoun in the 13th century. If you’ve studied any European languages, you’ve probably encountered this phenomenon before. For example, French uses the plural vous as a formal singular second-person pronoun, even though it’s normally a plural second-person pronoun, and German uses Sie, which is not just plural but also third person. When you address a single person formally in German, you literally call them they. To make matters even more complicated, the French also often use the singular third-person indefinite pronoun on (usually translated as “one”) to mean “we.” Thus you can say “On y va!” (literally “one goes there”) to mean “Let’s go!”

In English, the purely singular second-person form, thou, fell out of common use by the 17th century, leaving us with a plural pronoun pulling double duty. If pressing a plural pronoun into service as a singular were going to destroy our language’s sense of grammatical number, it would have happened over 400 years ago. Far from being an absolute and inviolable law, grammatical number is a flexible and even fluid concept. The beautiful thing is that language doesn’t come crashing down around us, leaving us all grunting and gesturing wildly in hopes of somehow being understood.

What’s a copyeditor to do?

The grammar and history lesson is all well and good from a linguistic point of view, but what are editors supposed to do? Isn’t it our job to resist questionable usage until it becomes standard? As I said earlier, this reasoning is problematic. Saying “We can’t use it yet because it’s not acceptable” is essentially the same as “We can’t accept it yet because it’s not acceptable.” It’s circular reasoning. If copyeditors are the gatekeepers of the language, then we have the power to make it acceptable. Lamenting the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun while actively resisting the best and most natural option is at least a little disingenuous.

And it may not be as unacceptable as some people say. In a recent Q&A on the Chicago Manual of Style Online site, the Chicago staff wrote, “The growing acceptance of they as a singular pronoun is in response to a need for a gender-neutral pronoun that avoids the use of he to mean he or she.” Though they say that rewriting a sentence to make it plural is often a good option, they note that this doesn’t always work, as in the earlier example Someone left their book on the desk. “In those contexts,” they say, “many language experts now approve of the use of they.” And as a writer friend of mine remarked to me, “If [I] had wanted to use plural nouns in the sentence, I would have written it that way in the first place.”

This brings up an interesting point: sometimes a writer intends to use singular they. It’s a natural solution to a vexing problem, and it’s been used by some of the best writers of the past five centuries. Readers are increasingly comfortable with it, and authorities are beginning to accept it. If a writer wants to use singular they, why shouldn’t we let them?