OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
Open search box
1 June 2022
Question: What’s wrong with the following sentence? If a writer cares about grammar, they’ll use pronouns carefully.
Answer: nothing!
Traditionally, it was seen as an error to use a plural pronoun (“they”) to refer to a singular antecedent (“a writer”). How many writers? One. How many does “they” mean? Usually, more than one. It doesn’t match. The traditional way to fix the “error” was to replace “they” with a singular pronoun: If a writer cares about grammar, he’ll use pronouns carefully. How many writers? One. How many does “he” mean? One. That’s a match. Error corrected, right?
Here’s the problem. Traditionally, when the gender was unknown or unimportant, like it is in our example, the masculine “he” was used to mean anyone. It was that same logic that produced words like “businessman,” “mankind,” and all our other gendered language. Well, the second-wave feminists of the 1950s and ’60s objected to this, and the whole language changed. We started saying “business person” and “humankind.” Easy enough except when it came to the issue of pronouns. It became standard to write “he or she,” a convention that lasted decades, into the 2010s or so. If a writer cares about grammar, he or she will use pronouns carefully.
But people were dissatisfied with this solution. The phrase “he or she” is a mouthful, it doesn’t come naturally, and it still places one gender ahead of the other. Some writers and publications used variations, such as “she or he,” or alternating “he” and “she” each time the situation came up. But those solutions aren’t much better, especially when we consider that some people don’t identify as either male or female, and so they’re still left out of those constructions, making them inaccurate. We don’t mean only men, or only women. We mean anyone, any writer.
The basic problem here is that English has no gender-neutral singular pronoun for these situations. People have tried introducing some, such as “zhe” or “ze,” but they haven’t caught on. As we explain in our introductory video, that’s the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar describes the language people already use rather prescribing the way they should use language. And that’s exactly where our current solution comes from.
The pronoun most of us use for this kind of situation in everyday speech is “they,” which is why the example at the beginning of this video might have sounded natural to you. That’s the way you would actually say it. And so more and more, all except the stodgiest linguists have given in and agreed that this is a common, standard, “correct” usage, not an error. We call it the singular “they.” That just means the word “they” can be used now as a singular pronoun, rather being saved exclusively for plurals, as it always was before. In fact, the American Dialect Society, a body of more than 200 linguists, named the singular “they” as Word of the Year in 2016. In 2019, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary followed suit, naming “they” as its own Word of the Year to recognize this change in its usage.
And it’s not the first time our language has changed this way. According to historians at the Oxford English Dictionary, the pronoun “you” has undergone the exact same transformation. For a long time it was used as a plural. The correct singular pronoun was considered to be “thou” until about the seventeenth century. And like today, the transition produced controversy. In 1660, the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, wrote a whole book about the foolishness of using “you” as a singular. Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray, grammarians from the 1700s, made their students take tests that enforced “thou” as singular and “you” as plural, only and always.
If that seems silly to you now, it’s just a testament to the way that language can evolve over time—and a strong indication that the singular “they” is the language of the future.
And of the present too.
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Bushnell, J.T.. "What is Singular They?" Oregon State Guide to Grammar, 1 June 2022, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-singular-they-oregon-state-guide-grammar. Accessed [insert date].
