They

This article is about the English personal pronoun. For other uses, see They (disambiguation).

They /ðeɪ/ is the third-person plural personal pronoun (subjective case) in Modern English.

Personal pronouns in standard Modern English

		Singular				Plural
		Subject	Object	Possessive	Reflexive	Subject	Object	Possessive	Reflexive
First		I	me	my	myself	we	us	our	ourselves
Second		you		your	yourself	you		your	yourselves
Third	Masculine	he	him	his	himself	they	them	their	themselves
	Feminine	she	her		herself
	Neuter	it		its	itself

Usage

The "singular" they is the use of this pronoun as a gender-neutral singular rather than as a plural pronoun. The correctness of this usage is disputed. The Oxford Dictionaries have an article on the usage, saying that it dates back to the 16th century.

The singular pronoun they is even found in formal or official texts. For example, a 2008 amendment to the Canadian Criminal Code contains the following text:

if a peace officer has reasonable grounds to believe that, because of their physical condition, a person may be incapable of providing a breath sample... (subparagraph 254(3)(a)(ii))

Which contrasts, for example, with subsection 252(2):

...evidence that an accused failed to stop his vehicle... and give his name and address is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, proof of an intent to escape civil or criminal liability.

In an article published in The New York Times Magazine by Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, they read:

Anne Fisher (1719-78) [an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book] was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

...

Meanwhile, many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians. In fact, so many people now use they in the old singular way that dictionaries and usage guides are taking a critical look at the prohibition against it. R. W. Burchfield, editor of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, has written that it’s only a matter of time before this practice becomes standard English: “The process now seems irreversible.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) already finds the singular they acceptable “even in literary and formal contexts,” but the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) isn’t there yet.

Etymology

In Old English, hīe was used as the third-person, personal pronoun (in the nominative and accusative case). It was gradually replaced by an Old Norse borrowing, þeir (nominative plural masculine of the demonstrative, which acted in Old Norse as a plural pronoun), until it was entirely replaced in around the 1400s in Middle English. Þeir, in turn, became they as it is known in Modern English today. Þeir originates from Proto-Germanic *þai-z ("those"), from Proto-Indo-European *toi ("those").

Personal pronouns in Middle English

		Singular			Plural
		Subject	Object	Possessive	Subject	Object	Possessive
First		ik / ich / I	me	my(n)	we	us	oure
Second		þou / thou	þee / thee	þy(n) / thy(n)	ȝe / ye	ȝow / you	ȝower / your
Third	Impersonal	hit	hit / him	his	he þei / they	hem þem / them	her þeir / their
	Masculine	he	him	his
	Feminine	ȝho / scho / sche	hire	hire

See also

• English personal pronouns
• Generic antecedents
• Objective pronoun
• Possessive pronoun
• Subjective pronoun
• Them