'xe', 'xem', and 'xyr' are sex-neutral pronouns and adjectives

You've come to this page because you've asked a question such as

What is this 'xe'/'xem'/'xyr' business?

This is the Frequently Given Answer to such questions.

They are sex-neutral third-person pronouns and adjectives.

For a long time, there was a hole in the pronoun system of the English language. The first-person and second-person pronouns do not imply sex. However, the third-person singular pronouns all implied sex, and there was no third-person pronoun that did not either imply a specific sex or imply a specific lack of a sex (i.e. neuter rather than neutral). Although the pronoun 'one' also implies nothing with regard to sex, it is an impersonal, rather than a third-person, pronoun.

This hole becomes particularly apparent when referring in the third person to people only known by pseudonyms that do not reveal their sex, a common occurrence on Usenet and on the WWW discussion fora that have followed it.

However, the existence of this hole is far from a new thing, and it has been acknowledged for many years prior to even the Internet's existence. As pointed out by Henry Churchyard, Otto Jesperson in 1894 wrote:

' But if we look more closely we shall see it is at times a great inconvenience to be obliged to specify the sex of the person spoken about. I remember once reading in some English paper a proposal to use the word thon as a personal pronoun of common gender; if it was substituted for he in such a proposition as this: "It would be interesting if each of the leading poets would tell us what he considers his best work", ladies would be spared the disparaging implication that the leading poets were all men. '⁷

William Hall had observed the hole almost half a century earlier:

' This last [a pronoun for nouns in the common gender] we have not in our language, but I have taken it upon me to supply this deficiency. That it will be adopted, and used, by the whole community, and made a part of our vocabulary, soon, I cannot anticipate; but that men of erudition will see the necessity of such a word, I cannot but believe. […] This mode of expression is necessary when, as it sometimes occurs, we want to speak of an individual, but do not wish to introduce the sex. '¹⁶

but even xe was not the first, as it had been pointed out even earlier still in the 17th century.

'Xe', 'xyr', and 'xem' fill this hole. They are sex-neutral third-person singular pronouns, that unlike the other third-person pronouns (but like the first-person and second-person pronouns) imply nothing about the sex of their antecedents. With them, the pronouns in the English language are as in the table.

Coinage

This FGA was first published in 2005, and for nigh on two decades I did not know whence these words originated. I had no more information than had the writers of Wiktionary, which originally traced usages of 'xe' and 'xem' to Usenet posts in the early 1990s.

I finally learned that these words not only pre-dated the World Wide Web, they pre-dated Usenet, pre-dated the Internet, and even pre-dated Teletext. Teletext, in the form of Ceefax, was pioneered by the BBC in 1972.⁴ The Internet was invented in 1973 and testing began of the new protocols in 1975. These words, albeit in one case in a form that shifted over the years to become rather different by the 1990s, were coined (according to their inventor) in 1971, and publicized in 1973.

That inventor was Donald ("Don") Oscar Rickter, and had I paid attention to the Wiktionary entries I would have seen xem come to Wiktionary in 2009 to correct the record, logging in as 'Wordwrestler'. Rickter died in 2024, and xyr obituary credits xem with inventing 'xe' "in the early 1970s"; without much further information.

However, Rickter in 2009 had named Mario Pei. Pei had covered Rickter's coinage in xyr 1978 book Weasel Words: The Art of Saying what You Don't Mean; but that was years late to the party. People had covered this as early as 1973 in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. Philip M. Cohen had written about it in "He, She, It, Tey" in November 1976 and David L. Silverman had written about it in November 1973 and in February 1974 in the "Kickshaws" column. Pei had actually got the information from Cohen's article of two years prior; and Cohen in turn got it from Silverman.

The original source of the information was Rickter's proposal, that xe publicized in a letter written to Unitarian Universalist World. Pei I believe mis-transcribed the name of the magazine as United Nations World, which was another magazine around at the time, but unrelated. Per Rickter's obituary, xe was a Unitarian Universalist, and thus the former magazine appears correct on that ground alone, as well as the record of the letter that is more contemporary and independent of Pei.

Grammar and phonetics: inflection and pronunciation

Rickter's proposed pronunciation was fairly logical, falling in line with existing words that began with 'xe-' as well as with existing pronouns such as 'he' and 'she'.

The object and possessive pronouns did not survive in the form that Rickter originally proposed. By the time of Usenet in the early 1990s Rickter's original 'xen' and 'xes' had drifted to 'xem' and 'xyr', and largely stabilized at those forms, still having them over a decade later when I first wrote this Frequently Given Answer (which has since probably served to further stabilize them, I expect).

It did not help that Silverman got the words wrong in 1973, and was corrected by a reader for the follow-up column in 1974. Silverman had used 'xem' instead of 'xen', and mis-formed 'xemselves' instead of 'xenself', a two-ply error that not only got the root wrong but applied a plural suffix '-selves' to a singular pronoun. Fortunately, 'xemselves' was corrected; but 'xem' seems to have stuck, or been resurrected by a similar mis-reading (or mis-hearing⁵) of Rickter somewhen in the two decades between Rickter's proposal and 1990s Usenet.

Further evidence that this stabilization has set in is that at least one author, publishing a book in 2018, actually attributed the 'xem' and 'xyr' forms to Rickter. Sydney Brouillard-Coyle's self-published 2023 A Pocket Guide to Pronouns made a similar mistake of attributing the wrong forms to the wrong person, claiming that Mario Pei coined 'xem' and 'xyr' (despite Pei, if one actually reads Weasel Words, clearly naming Rickter) but equally demonstrating that the forms have been fixed from early 1990s Usenet to the 2020s.

The sex-neutral reflexive pronoun has not completely stabilized, but neither have the sex-specific ones, which have had ample chance to. For first and second person, the reflexive pronouns are formed by appending '-self' to the pronominal adjective. However, there are two schools of thought on the formation of third person reflexive pronouns:

• The first school follows the original etymology from Middle English (such as 'himselfum'→'himself') and uses an irregular formation: forming the female and explicit no-sex pronouns by appending '-self' to the pronominal adjective, whilst forming the male pronoun by appending '-self' to the object pronoun.

• The second school regularizes the formation, appending '-self' to the pronominal adjective in all cases.

Thus the first school uses 'himself', 'herself', and 'themselves', whilst the second school uses 'hisself', 'herself', and 'theirselves'.

The reflexive sex-neutral pronoun, is likewise either 'xemself' or 'xyrself'. The latter, using the regular formation from the pronominal adjective in all cases, is the more popular, however.

The pronunciation of 'xem' as /zɛm/ is a straightforward analogue of Rickter's pronunciation of 'xen'. It rhymes with 'them'; and also with 'fem', 'Jem', 'gem', 'chem', 'mem', and 'REM'. Wiktionary's alternative suggestion of /ksɛm/, whilst logical and attractive, seems somewhat fanciful if one is being a hard-headed phoneticist; because for starters a following vowel in other words normally shifts the voiceless consonants to a voiced /gzɛm/.

The pronunciation of 'xyr' is unclear. Rhyming with 'her' seems unlikely, as that has the more obvious spelling 'xer' that would have been used. Equally unlikely is the 'xy-' pronunciation of 'xylophone' and 'xylem', with the dipthong /zaɪ/. The best bet seems to me to be rhyming with 'here', rhotically (in General American) as /zɪɹ/ and non-rhotically (in Standard Southern English) as /zɪə/. Again, /ksɪɹ/ and /ksɪə/ are logical, but seem somewhat fanciful; because /gzɪɹ/ and /gzɪə/ is how these would end up in practice, with the consonants becoming voiced.

Pre-dating ABBA

ABBA formed in 1972. Classing these as "neopronouns" is an attempt to dismissively pass them off as a lot more novel than they truly are. Pre-dating ABBA is not "neo" by any stretch of the imagination.

Rickter and contemporaries were dealing with long standing linguistic problems that went back to Jesperson in the 19th century and beyond, but had become particularly acute because of the Women's Liberation movement. For contemporary discussions of the issues see:

• "Women's Liberation and Language" in Israel Shenker's Words and Their Masters published in 1974, which records the issue of 'chairman'/'chairwoman'/'chairperson' and also covers things such as Varda One's coinage of 've'/'ver'/'vis' sex-neutral pronouns;⁹

• Dennis E. Baron's Grammar and Gender published by YUP in 1986, which contains a number of errors (such as dating 'thon' to 1884, and entirely omitting Rickter¹⁰);

• "Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular 'They', Sex-Indefinite 'He', and 'He or She'" by Ann Bodine in Language in Society (volume 4 issue 2 August 1975 pages 129–146 JSTOR DOI), which argued against the sexist bubbleheads that not only wanted to do away with singular 'they' but even do away with 'he or she'; and

• Nancy M. Henley's "This new species that seeks a new language: on sexism in language and language change" in Women and Language in Transition (edited by Joyce Penfield) published by SUNY Press in 1987, which reports on a lot of 1970s and early 1980s research that overwhelmingly debunked with actual data the "'he' is generic" argument, the "sexism is harmless in this case" argument, and the "people do not want this" argument, and which also points to some of the ways in which science-fiction writers had already been promoting the idea or sex-neutral pronouns (and titles) since the 1920s.

Even the "gender-neutral" appellation is somewhat anachronistic. Hall, Jesperson, and Converse (see later) called it "common gender" (Jesperson also using "genderless"); Bodine talked about "sex-indefinite"; and many others talk about sex-neutrality and sexism.

Semantics

The semantics of sex-neutral pronouns — all of them; 'xe'/'xem'/'xyr'/'xyrs', the Spivak ones, Varda One's coinages, and others — remain unchanged from Otto Jesperson's time. As Rickter said, they are indeterminate, not sex-specifying. They are a way of not connoting a sex, the same as the pronouns in the other persons and numbers do not.

Alas, the Internet being what it is, there are trolls and dimwits who claim otherwise. They are wrong; ignore them and remember:

• When people use sex-neutral prounouns they do not wish to imply any specific sex of a third person; from Otto Jesperson's not wanting to imply that the leading poets were all men, to people on Usenet and World Wide Web discussion fora not having the faintest clue who is behind a pseudonym, or considering that someone's sex is irrelevant to the matter at hand anyway.

• When people ask to be referred to in the third person with sex-neutral prounouns they are asking not to be ascribed a specific sex.

• Gender-neutral prounouns do not ascribe a gender, this being their core function. It is impossible to "misgender" with them, by definition. 'xe' is no more a misgendering than 'we' is.

Inferior alternatives

Singular 'they'

Using 'they'/'them'/'their'/'theirs' as if they were singular pronouns does not fill this hole, as it leads to contradictions in number and ambiguities about antecendents, and cannot be used reflexively:

• 'The members of the board saw <butterfly@example.com>'s most recent new clients and decided that he is valuable to the company.'

  Consider the use of singular 'they' to eliminate the implied sex of 'he' in the aforegiven:

  'The members of the board saw <butterfly@example.com>'s most recent new clients and decided that they are valuable to the company.'

  Using singular 'they' has lead to ambiguity. Who is valuable to the company, the members of the board, <butterfly@example.com>, or the clients? With the sex-neutral third-person pronouns this can be made unambiguous once again:

  'The members of the board saw <butterfly@example.com>'s most recent new clients and decided that xe is valuable to the company.'

  <butterfly@example.com> is valuable to the company.

• '<butterfly@example.com> is very proud of themself.'

  'Themself' is not recognized as a reflexive pronoun, 'theirself' is a contradiction in number, and both 'theirselves' and 'themselves' simply do not fit at all. However:

  '<butterfly@example.com> is very proud of xyrself.'

• 'I would like to know if <butterfly@example.com> thinks that they are going to be as successful next year.'

  Most people read this as a pronoun with no antecedent. Who are going to be as successful next year? Using 'he', 'she', or even 'it' assumes facts not in evidence about the sex of <butterfly@example.com>, and using 'they is' instead of 'they are' as a form of clarification is a disagreement in number between subject and verb. However:

  'I would like to know if <butterfly@example.com> thinks that xe is going to be as successful next year.'

As Ann Bodine⁶ pointed out in the aforecited, singular 'they' is not a problem because it is somehow "ungrammatical". Like 'alright', singular 'they' was perfectly fine English until Latinist prescriptive grammarians, particularly of the 18th and 19th century, took a dislike to it.⁸ Singular 'they' is problematic because 'they is' and 'themself' do not exist to remove introduced ambiguities, the same introduced ambiguities that exist for singular 'you' (which have led to the likes of 'yous' and 'y'all') where 'yourself' and 'yourselves' contrariwise do exist. Alas, not even Matt Parker, of Numberphile and Stand-Up Maths fame who is one prominent 21st century user of a blanket singular 'they', has yet to fix the introduced ambiguities by also adopting 'they is' and 'themself'.

Other alternatives

There have been numerous attempts to fill this hole over the years, dating back as far as 1850. The most common alternatives to 'xe'/'xem'/'xyr' are:

the 'Spivak' pronouns: 'e'/'em'/'eir'/'eirs'

Unfortunately, these are ambiguous, and problematic for the same reason that we have a 'she' pronoun in the first place. We have 'she' because the original subject case third-person singular female pronoun, 'heo', became indistinguishable in certain dialects from 'he' in the 12th century. The 'Spivak' pronoun 'e' is already indistinguishable from the Cockney pronunciation of 'he'.

'sie'/'hir'/'hirs'

Unfortunately, these have a history of being sex-specific pronouns. 'hir' is the form of 'her' from Chaucerian times. 'sie' is German for (amongst other things) 'she'.

'thon'/'thon'/'thons'

Like 'xe', although 'thon' was publicized in 1884 its inventor stated that it was invented years earlier.¹¹ One problem with it, that actually occurred in practice, was type.¹² It was easy for typesetters to set 'u' instead of 'n' (the one being the other umop-apisdn) and end up with 'thou' in error, which then did not get caught during proofreading.

It was certainly popular in the letters pages of magazines, from The Critic itself to The Educational Weekly, and of course it came to Jesperson's attention some time in the subsequent decade. Many commentators have observed that it even made the pages of two dictionaries: Webster's and Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary. Fewer commentators have read the credit page in the preface to the latter to discover that Charles Crozat Converse was an advisor on the Standard Dictionary.¹³ And of course Webster's still had a tradition inherited from Noah Webster when it came to new coinages and improving the language by rewriting the dictionary.

One amusing contemporary reaction, given that people were railing against singular 'they' on Latinist grammmar grounds and many of the reactionary letter writers were questioning even the very need for such a thing, came from the Boston Globe, which pointed out that singular 'they' was a perfectly cromulent construction already in widespread use.¹⁴ The Ohio Educational Monthly, half a decade before 'thon' came to the world's attention¹⁵, had pointed out the same thing, calling out examples of singular 'they' from Samuel Richardson's 1748 Clarrisa Harlowe and others.

"popular speech and the practice of writers is destined to gain the day," wrote the editor of the Monthly "and the grammars of a hundred years hence will doubtless admit this use". We all know, per Bodine of 96 years afterwards, that the Latinists had not conceded defeat.

Footnotes

1. 'thou', 'thee', 'thine', and 'thy' are considered archaic by many U.S.A. English speakers, although they are still in common use in some dialects of U.K. English.

2. The original object pronoun 'ye' is considered archaic by many U.S.A. English and U.K. English speakers, who use 'you' instead, but it is still in common use by Republic of Ireland English speakers.

3. See the grammar section for reflexive pronouns.

4. Specifically, a prototype of Ceefax was demonstrated on Tomorrow's World in October 1972, and it was being field-trialled by 1973.

5. It is reasonable to suppose that the reason that the pronouns were even used on Usenet was that they existed in spoken English in the decades in between Rickter's proposal and the Usenet posts.

6. Ann Bodine was at the time an anthropologist teaching in the sociology department of Rutgers University.

7. Otto Jespersen (1894). "Ancient and Modern Languages". Progress in Language: With Special Reference to English. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Company. p. 27

8. Jesperson in 1894 did not go as far as Bodine in 1975, but still observed that 19th century grammarians were excluding a real part of the language as it existed, and cited examples of singular 'they' from Fielding's Tom Jones, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, John Ruskin's Selections, and several others.

9. Much of which was earlier published as: Israel Shenker (1971-08-29). "Is It Possible for a Woman to Manhandle the King's English?" New York Times.

10. Baron's propensity for casual errors continued in the 21st century. Although xyr 2020 updated work What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She published by Liverlight finally included Rickter, Baron gave the proposal just 2 sentences, the second of which was "Although his proposal appeared in a national Unitarian Journal, nothing came of it."

    At the point that Baron published that, Jim Sinclair's use on Usenet was 28 years old, this FGA had been published for 15 years, Wiktionary and Wikipedia had had the word for slightly longer, the Vancouver School Board's policy recognizing 'xe'/'xem'/'xyr' was 6 years old, the SAGE Encyclopaedia of LGBTQ Studies had included the pronouns for 4 years, and more besides.

    As a purported "nothing", that seems rather a lot.

11. Converse's letter under the title "A New Pronoun" dated 1884-07-23 appeared in the 1884-08-02 issue of The Critic and Good Literature and claims the coinage had occurred "several years ago". The claim of coinage in 1858 in the Standard Dictionary was presumably sourced directly from Converse xyrself.

    Interestingly, this puts Converse's claim in the same decade as 'ne'/'nim'/'nis', a thirty-year-old coinage at that point that was pointed to by the editor of The Critic and Good Literature in response to several letters.

12. Pointed out by Francis H. Williams in a letter in the 1884-08-16 issue of The Critic and Good Literature.

13. Rupert Hughes's profile of Charles Crozat Converse as part of the "Music In America" series published in Godey's Magazine (volume 134 issue 799 January 1897 pages 80 et seq.) explicitly pointed this connection out. Hughes observed the irony of the contemporary Strictly Ballroom-esque "No new words!" railing that 'thon' engendered, in an age where "electricians and scientists needy of words" were coining new ones left, right, and centre.

14. See J. E. Pratt's letter in the 1884-08-16 issue of The Critic and Good Literature.

15. Editorial, volume 28 issue 1, January 1879, pages 18–19.

16. William Hall (1850). "Of Pronouns". Encyclopædia of English Grammar. Scott & Bascom. Hall had coined 'ne'/'nis'/'nim', deriving them from the Latin 'nonnemo'.