He (pronoun)


"He" is the masculine third-person, singular personal pronoun in Modern English. In traditional forms of English grammar it is also used as a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.

Usage

Original and modern scope

As in many languages, in Old English each noun had a grammatical gender, and a pronoun was generally selected according to its antecedent's grammatical gender. Thus because dæg was masculine, one would refer to the day as he. Since in Modern English nouns have no grammatical gender, only the sex of the referent determines the pronoun to use.

Generic pronoun

The generic he serves as a pronoun whose antecedent is any noun denoting a social category under which both sexes fall:
Ann Fisher's first prescribed the generic he in her 1745 grammar book A New Grammar. It was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until around the 1960s.

Other

In referring to their God or to Jesus Christ, and whenever referring to the Holy Spirit conceived on that occasion to be masculine, some Christians use the capitalized forms He, His, and Him.

Etymology

He has always been the third-person masculine pronoun in English, as this table of the pronouns of Old English shows:
Although the pronoun has always been spelled the same, its Old English pronunciation was closer to that of modern hay.
As the OE table shows, hine and him were respectively the accusative and dative cases of he. These oblique forms persisted in Middle English:
Hence in modern English the dative form him took on the accusative functions of accusative hine.