Singular They is A-Okay

Pop quiz: Is the following sentence grammatically correct?

The owner of the blue Toyota needs to move their car.

It’s the kind of thing we all say in casual conversation, but it seems wrong, doesn’t it? “The owner” is singular, but “their” is plural. Shouldn’t you technically say, “The owner of the blue Toyota needs to move his or her car”?

Actually, no. According to Merriam-Webster, the dictionary we use here at BookPros, the word “they” is a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral singular pronoun, “even in literary and formal contexts.” When you’re talking about someone whose gender you don’t know or about a general, theoretical person, you can feel free to use “they” and “their.”

Language sticklers often bristle at the singular “they,” viewing it as a concession to widespread modern ignorance of grammar. To them, it’s like accepting the non-word “irregardless” as legitimate, just because people have started to say it so often in the past few decades. In reality, though, the singular “they” has been around for hundreds of years. Shakespeare used it, and so did the King James Bible.

If you’re more old-school than King James and simply can’t bring yourself to use it, the following methods are also acceptable in cases where you don’t know the gender of the person to whom you’re referring:

• The general “you”: If your book isn’t too formal in tone, you can use the word “you” like this blog post does to refer to a theoretical person. You can’t use “you” to refer to a specific person whose gender you don’t know, though. “The owner of the blue Toyota needs to move your car” doesn't mean the same thing as the previous sample sentence.


• The general “one”: If one wants to avoid the singular “they,” one can use the general “one” instead, as I’m doing now. One should be careful, however, because when one wades into a sentence with too many uses of the word “one,” one can start to sound more stilted and silly than one would like. Again, this method only works for a theoretical person. One wouldn’t say, “The owner of the blue Toyota needs to move one’s car.”


• Alternating between “he” and “she”: If your book or article involves references to a theoretical person, it will probably use many examples in different places. If you use “he” in one, “she” in the next, and so on, your book will be gender-neutral when taken as a whole, though the individual examples won’t be.


• “He or she”: If someone doesn’t care for the singular “they,” he or she can use two singular pronouns, one of each gender, instead. As with the general “one,” the writer should be careful about using “he or she” too many times in his or her writing, as it can become awkward and unwieldy. Unlike the previous examples, this method can be used in any situation where a singular person’s gender is unclear, whether that person is theoretical or in a restaurant refusing to own up to having parked his or her blue Toyota in front of a fire hydrant.

Some people use “he” to refer to an individual whose gender is unknown. It’s best not to do this, because “he” is not gender-neutral. In fact, women make up slightly more than half of the world’s population, so whoever you’re talking about is statistically more likely to be female than male.