Singular They: A History Older Than You Think
Singular "they" — using "they" to refer to a single person of unspecified or non-binary gender ("someone left their umbrella") — is often treated as a recent, politically motivated innovation. The actual documented history runs the opposite direction: singular "they" has been in continuous use in English for well over six hundred years, predating the modern usage debate by centuries.
Chaucer and Middle English usage
Geoffrey Chaucer used singular "they" in his writing in the late 14th century, well before modern English had even fully separated from Middle English. The construction wasn't a rare or marginal usage even then — it filled a genuine gap in the pronoun system: English has no dedicated gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun for a person of unspecified or unknown gender, and "they" had already been pressed into that role by the time some of the language's earliest and most celebrated literary works were written.
Shakespeare and the Early Modern period
The pattern continues clearly into Early Modern English. Shakespeare used singular "they" repeatedly across his plays, including in lines like "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend" from The Comedy of Errors, where "their" refers back to the singular "a man." This wasn't an isolated poetic license either — singular "they" appears across a wide range of Early Modern English writers and registers, from drama to everyday correspondence, indicating it was a normal, unremarkable part of the language's grammar during this period rather than a deliberate stylistic flourish.
Where the modern objection actually comes from
The idea that singular "they" is somehow ungrammatical is a considerably more recent development than the usage itself, tracing largely to 18th- and 19th-century prescriptive grammarians who were actively trying to remake English grammar to more closely resemble Latin's grammatical logic — the same period and the same impulse behind several other invented rules covered elsewhere on this site, like the rule against split infinitives. Those grammarians objected to singular "they" on the reasoning that "they" is grammatically plural and therefore logically shouldn't refer to a single person — a tidy-sounding argument that ignored the fact that the construction had already been in continuous, ordinary use in English for roughly four hundred years by the time the objection was first raised.
The modern usage debate is genuinely different from the historical one
It's worth being precise about what actually changed in recent decades: singular "they" referring to a person of unknown or unspecified gender ("somebody forgot their keys") is the same usage Chaucer and Shakespeare used centuries ago, and was never seriously in dispute among ordinary speakers even during the period prescriptive grammarians officially objected to it. What is genuinely newer is singular "they" used as a specific individual's stated personal pronoun, for a known person who identifies as non-binary — a usage that extends the older grammatical pattern to a new social function rather than reviving an extinct one. Major style guides and dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster and the Associated Press Stylebook, have both explicitly endorsed this newer usage in recent years, treating it as a natural extension of a pronoun that was already flexible enough to cover unspecified-gender reference for over six centuries.
Why this history matters for the current debate
None of this history settles every question people currently have about pronoun usage, but it does settle one specific, factual claim that comes up constantly: singular "they" is not a modern grammatical invention, and objecting to it as "bad grammar" or a recent corruption of the language ignores several centuries of continuous documented usage by exactly the writers most often held up as models of correct English.
What grammarians actually objected to, in their own words
The 18th-century objection to singular "they" is traceable to specific published grammar texts of the period, several of which explicitly argued from the premise that a pronoun's grammatical number should match its antecedent's number in strict one-to-one correspondence, treating any exception as a logical inconsistency to be corrected rather than as a legitimate feature of how English pronouns had actually always worked. This period of English grammar writing produced a cluster of similarly logic-driven invented rules — the objections to split infinitives and sentence-final prepositions covered elsewhere on this site emerged from the same intellectual movement and the same underlying assumption, that a more "rational," Latin-like grammatical system was inherently superior to English's messier, historically accumulated actual usage patterns.
How dictionaries and style guides caught up
The turning point for singular "they" in modern reference works came notably in 2019, when Merriam-Webster named "they" (in its singular, non-binary-identity sense) its word of the year, citing both the historical precedent for singular "they" generally and the specific surge in searches reflecting the newer personal-pronoun usage. The Associated Press Stylebook had already updated its guidance the preceding year to permit singular "they" in cases where a person's gender is unknown or where an individual specifically uses "they" as their personal pronoun, treating both as legitimate rather than as errors requiring workaround phrasing. These updates didn't invent a new grammatical rule out of nothing; they formally recognized, in current style guidance, a pattern that had already been present in the spoken and written language, in one form or another, for centuries.
A useful parallel: what happened to 'thou' and 'you'
English pronoun history offers a genuinely useful precedent for how a single pronoun can quietly absorb both a singular and a plural role without the language breaking down: Old and Middle English distinguished "thou"/"thee" (singular "you") from "ye"/"you" (plural "you"), a distinction still visible in the King James Bible and in Shakespeare's own plays, where the choice between "thou" and "you" toward a single person also carried social meaning — "thou" for intimacy or condescension, "you" for formality or respect. By the 17th and 18th centuries, ordinary speakers had abandoned the singular "thou" almost entirely in everyday speech, letting the formerly plural-only "you" cover both singular and plural reference, exactly the kind of one-word-does-both-jobs shift that singular "they" is often accused of being uniquely unprecedented for. Nobody today experiences any confusion from "you" doing double duty as both singular and plural; the same accommodation is what English speakers have already been making, unconsciously, with singular "they" for over six centuries.
Frequently asked questions
Did Shakespeare actually use singular 'they'?
Yes — linguistic surveys of Shakespeare's full body of work have catalogued well over a dozen separate instances across the comedies, histories, and tragedies, not just the one line quoted above. The usage didn't stop with him either: Jane Austen used the identical construction two centuries later, in Mansfield Park and Emma, which is worth knowing because it shows singular "they" stayed current in respected literary English right up through the period when 18th- and 19th-century grammarians were simultaneously arguing against it in grammar textbooks.
Where did the objection to singular 'they' come from, if it's been used for centuries?
Largely from 18th- and 19th-century prescriptive grammarians who wanted English grammar to more closely mirror Latin's logical structure, and who objected to "they" referring to a singular antecedent on the grounds that "they" is grammatically plural — an argument raised centuries after the usage was already well established in ordinary English writing.