People Have Invented More Than 200 Gender-Neutral Pronouns. Here's Why ‘They’ Is Here to Stay

It is a well-known truth that so long as English is changing, there will be people who are 14.1 BELLY-ACHING about it, warning that if things keep going as they are, the language will soon be on life support. Critics feared for the future when people started using contact as a verb in the 1920s and when they embraced text-speak like OMG in the 2000s. And, they have 14.2 LAMENTED the usage of one pronoun in particular: singular they.

For centuries, poets and pundits have observed that English is missing a word: a gender-neutral, third-person pronoun that could be used in place of he or she when gender is unknown or irrelevant. They has long been proposed as the answer. But grammarians have considered singular they unfit for print, holding fast to the rule that educated people use they only as a plural.

All the while singular they has been 14.3 LURKING in the background. And now it’s moving to the fore. A driving force has been the LGBTQ community, which has embraced singular they not only to include both men and women but also to refer to non-binary people who identify as neither. That has added social conservatives to the word’s 14.4 DETRACTORS, but has also given it steam. The new binary-busting usage made it the American Dialect Society’s “Word of the Year” in 2015 and then Merriam-Webster’s in 2019.

This also helped inspire linguistic authorities to put down their red pens. In 2015, the Washington Post copy desk announced that the paper would start allowing singular they. In 2017, the Associated Press Stylebook approved it “when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy.” The same year, the Chicago Manual of Style said that if an individual prefers to be referred to as they, then they is the preferred style. And each evolution has added to the sense that this usage isn’t just 14.5 CONVENIENT, it’s also grammatically okay.