Singular “They” Is Six Hundred Years Old
Somebody left their umbrella.
If that sentence sounds normal, you already use singular they. Almost everyone does, including the people who object to it.
The history
Singular they appears in English from at least the fourteenth century. Chaucer uses it. Shakespeare uses it — there’s not a man I meet but doth salute me as if I were their well-acquainted friend. So do Austen, Thackeray, Shaw and Auden.
The objection is much younger. In 1745 the grammarian Anne Fisher proposed that he should serve as the generic pronoun, and the idea was taken up through the nineteenth century, reaching its high point in an 1850 Act of Parliament that declared he to include women in legal drafting.
So the sequence is: six hundred years of usage, then a proposal against it, then a century of grammar books enforcing the proposal, then a return to the older pattern. Singular they is not new. The prohibition was the innovation.
The alternatives, and why each fails
Generic he. Every student should bring his book. Excludes half the students, and reads as dated to most modern readers.
He or she. Accurate and unwieldy. It collapses under repetition: every student should bring his or her book, and he or she should ensure that he or she has read it.
S/he. Unpronounceable, and only solves the subject form.
Invented pronouns. Thon, ze, xe and dozens of others have been proposed since the 1850s. Almost none entered general use. Pronouns are a closed class, and closed classes resist addition.
Pluralising the sentence. Students should bring their books. Genuinely the best fix when it is available, and it often is. It also changes the emphasis from the individual to the group, which is sometimes wrong.
What the style guides now say
- The Associated Press accepted singular they in 2017.
- The Chicago Manual of Style accepts it for a person whose gender is unknown, and for a person who uses it.
- Merriam-Webster records it as standard, and named it word of the year in 2019.
- The APA requires it.
The consensus among style authorities is settled. What remains is a generation of readers taught otherwise, which is a social fact rather than a grammatical one.
The verb agreement point
The common objection is that they takes a plural verb, so a singular subject with they is inconsistent.
English already does this. You was originally plural only — singular was thou. When you took over the singular, it kept the plural verb, which is why we say you are to one person and nobody finds it troubling. Singular they follows the same pattern exactly.
If you are is acceptable for one person, so is they are.
In practice
Use it when the person is unknown or unspecified: whoever wrote this forgot their name. Use it for a specific person who uses it. Pluralise the sentence where that reads better, which is often.
And if someone tells you it is a recent corruption of the language, they are off by about six hundred years.
Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.
