You’ve probably come across the singular pronoun “they” recently. Perhaps it was in the Washington Post’s recent addition of it to the paper’s style guide. Perhaps it was in this BBC article about gender-neutral pronouns. Perhaps it was in this viral Tumblr post comparing singular “they” to singular “you.” Wherever the source, singular “they” has become more popular in 2015 than ever before–so popular, in fact, that it’s Quartz’s (unofficial) nomination for Word of the Year. 
 
 Let’s clear something up right away. Using “they” to refer to a single person isn’t new, but words of the year rarely are. Rather, this usage has been simmering for many years, finally bursting onto the scene this year with a newfound prominence. And just in time, too. Language can and should keep up with cultural shifts, including developments in society’s understanding of gender. While some holdout grammarians and copy editors might squirm, it’s become increasingly clear that our current pronoun palette simply isn’t sufficient. Luckily, we already have a perfectly good word at the ready. 
 
 We must remember that language is not meant to be static—and never has been. In fact, the first written citation of singular “they” dates all the way back to the 1300s. Here’s a selection from Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue (c. 1395): 
 
 And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, 
 
 They wol come up… 
 
 It’s not just Chaucer, though: the use of singular “they” continues throughout the centuries. Here it is again in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, from 1594: 
 
 There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me 
 
 As if I were their well-acquainted friend 
 
 There are 75 examples of singular “they” in Jane Austen, so I’ll leave most of them to the link, but here are a few from Pride & Prejudice (1813): 
 
 “I cannot pretend to be sorry… that he [Darcy] or that any man should not be estimated beyond their deserts; but with him I believe it does not often happen.” “To be sure, you knew no actual good of me—but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.” 
 
 In fact, singular “they” turns up so often in the history of English literature that it seems a bit absurd there’s any controversy about it at all. How did we get the idea that there was something wrong with singular “they”? 
 
 In the late 18th century, grammarians with a serious case of Latin-envy decided that when you didn’t know the gender of someone you were referring to, the best option was to use “he.” The idea was that since Latin didn’t have a singular “they,” English shouldn’t either. The proposal for “he” as a substitute arises from a similar (sexist) logic as that which led to the use of “mankind” to refer to all of humanity. (Latin also didn’t have a lot of other perfectly fine English things, such as split infinitives or sentence-ending prepositions: you can blame these folks for most of your grammar angst). 
 
 “He” has never been a perfect solution: As soon as it took the place of singular “they,” people wished for a gender-neutral alternative. 
 
 Although lots of well-regarded writers (Dickens, Eliot, Wilde, and many others) kept using singular “they,” the proposed alternative—ostensibly the ungendered “he”—did become relatively common. And importantly, the generic “he” started being recommended by people with the power to influence others’ language, such as copy editors, English teachers, and writers of popular style guides like Strunk & White. 
 
 But “he” has never been a perfect solution: pretty much as soon as it started taking the place of singular “they,” people began to wish for a truly gender-neutral alternative, as early as Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1808 and Otto Jespersen in 1894. But the big backlash started in earnest the 1970s, when Kate Swift and Casey Miller published first essays and then books linking words like generic “he” and “mankind” to sexism. 
 
 But what to use instead? Language reformers and non-binary linguistic activists alike have invented a plethora of new words like ey, eir, em (the Spivak pronouns) and xe, xir, xem, both with a variety of spellings. But novel pronouns have had a hard time catching on. Other people use “he and she” or “s/he,” but these options get clunky fast, especially when you need to repeat them, and they overlook people who don’t identify with “he” or “she,” a group that’s also become more visible in 2015. (The New York Times, for example, quietly decided to allow “Mx” as a gender-neutral title in pieces this year—as did Oxford Dictionaries and the British Government.) 
 
 The increasing visibility of genderqueer and non-binary folks who prefer to be referred to as “they” has pushed this acceptance along even faster—if you’re writing a news article about a they-user, either you use complicated syntactic tricks to avoid writing pronouns at all, or you simply follow their preferences. And then once you’ve accepted singular “they” in such cases, why not also let it rescue you from clunky phrasing when gender is unknown, nonspecific, or irrelevant? 
 
 The good news is the mainstream seems to finally be catching up to what sensible grammarians and excellent writers have been saying for ages: there’s just no good reason to condemn singular “they.” And more importantly, there are plenty of reasons to embrace it. 
 
 Once you’ve accepted singular “they,” why not also let it rescue you from other clunky phrasing? 
 
 Google Trends shows us that searches for “singular they” were up all through 2015, with the highest spike yet occurring in April 2015, probably owing to Ben Zimmer’s column in the Wall Street Journal. Zimmer was reporting on the annual meeting of the American Copy Editors Society: “Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular ‘they’ may be easing their stance.” Searches for “singular they” spiked again in September 2015, this time probably caused by several colleges adding support for gender-neutral pronouns. 
 
 Ultimately, it’s popular support that really matters. Language is changing constantly: the English of Shakespeare’s day doesn’t sound like our English today, and the English of 500 years from now will have changed even further. It’s a grassroots, open source, democratic process—and in this case, it’s clear that people are voting for singular “they.” For example, over 100,000 people have interacted with this Tumblr post pointing out that plenty of pronouns and other words have changed during the history of English. Singular “you,” once a radical innovation, gradually displaced “thou/thee” (for that matter, if you’re the Queen or Helen Mirren, you can even get away with singular “we”). 
 
 Going further back, “they” itself is a relative newcomer to English, arriving in Middle English from an Old Norse word meaning “those.” (A relic of the Old English third plural pronoun is found in ‘em, as in “go get ’em.” It seems like the apostrophe stands for a dropped “th” in “them,” but it’s actually from a dropped “h” in “hem,” just like we sometimes drop the h’s in “his” and “her.” But “hem” sounded too close to “him,” so people gradually started using the Norse word instead.) 
 
 Language is changing constantly: the English of Shakespeare’s day doesn’t sound like our English today. 
 
 Historical references aside, perhaps the best way to push singular “they” into large-scale circulation is just to keep using it. The internet is way ahead of the game here: Facebook has been using singular “they” for almost a decade now when users decline to state a gender or, more recently, indicate that they actively prefer being referred to as “they.” And it’s become generally common online to refer to other users as “they” (such as when replying in a comment thread) when you don’t have any cues about their gender. 
 
 More official sources have also approved of singular “they.” The Canadian Government, for example, specifically endorses it. And John McIntyre, copy editor at the Baltimore Sun, has been letting in singular “they” for several years now, and he says that no one’s ever complained. It’s not approved by The Economist’s style guide, but the language columnist there endorsed it in 2014. 
 
 In fact, even that most conservative of sources, edited books, have seen increases in singular “they.” Using Google Ngrams, a corpus of published books, we can see increases in the past few decades from both a search for “themself” and a comparison of “everyone has their own” versus “everyone has his own.” While many of these uses are probably subconscious (even authors that officially condemn singular “they” often use it elsewhere), there’s at least one book with a mainstream publisher that uses singular “they” as a conscious style choice. Its author blogged: “There was no back-and-forth: They said this was a point of view they hadn’t considered before, and they accepted it entirely, and agreed to re-insert all of my singular ‘they’s.” 
 
 Liberal Tumblr and conservative copy editors may not agree on a lot of things, linguistically speaking. But in 2015, they may finally have found some common ground. 
 
 This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers. ||||| I have a new favorite mug. It was given to me by the graduate students in the Joint Program in English and Education (JPEE) and celebrates my advocacy of singular they—with the explanatory footnote. 
 
 But when can we stop including the footnote? 
 
 We got one step closer two weeks ago, when Bill Walsh, chief of the night copy desk at The Washington Post, sent an email to the newsroom announcing some changes in the style guidelines. In addition to eliminating the hyphen in email and endorsing the spelling mic over mike, his email gave in to singular they as “permissible” when rewriting the sentence to make it plural is “impossible or hopelessly awkward.” Walsh also noted the usefulness of they when referring to people who identify outside the male-female binary. 
 
 Walsh’s email — and more specifically the part of his email about singular they — made headlines, including an article by Bill Walsh himself. John E. McIntyre, night content production editor at The Baltimore Sun and a long-time advocate of singular they, published a nice piece addressing some of the common objections to singular they. And Arika Okrent, blogging at Mental Floss, predicted that other news organizations will follow the Post’s lead. I would guess she is right. 
 
 This is how rules change: one style guide at a time. And often cautiously. Walsh does not wholeheartedly embrace singular they. He frames it as a permissible last resort when there is no way to get around the need for a generic singular pronoun. When nothing terrible happens — readers are not confused by singular they, if they even notice it, and no one cancels their subscription to the newspaper over it — singular they will become an ever more standard option. 
 
 It will take a while for widespread acceptance of singular they among English teachers and copy editors. After all, some of them are still strictly enforcing the rule about not splitting infinitives, and that was cautiously accepted by Oxford and others some 20 years ago. But I think it is fair to say that singular they now has its foot solidly in the door of acceptable English usage. Or, to change the metaphor, the gatekeepers of formal English usage have cracked open the gate. 
 
 As a historian of the English language, I have accepted this cautious creep toward acceptability, even though there is nothing grammatically wrong with singular they other than the fact that people say there is something wrong with it. It makes sense that the dissipation of long-established grammar and style rules takes time. 
 
 As a professor of English and a copy editor, I am one of the gatekeepers when it comes to what counts as “acceptable” in formal, edited prose. I am doing and will continue to do what I can to speed things along: I voted “completely acceptable” for all the sentences with singular they on the 2015 usage survey for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language; I will continue to use singular they in my own academic writing; I talk with students about the debate in class; and obviously I can’t seem to help but blog about singular they here. The next step is to assume that my readers will see singular they as standard enough (e.g., in the line above about no one canceling their subscription) that it merits no special comment. 
 
 I have decided to keep the mug and drop the footnote. ||||| It has been a big week for proponents of non-binary gender identifiers. On Wednesday, The New York Times included a new honorific — Mx. — in a story that quoted Senia Hardwick, a bookshop employee who didn’t want to be assigned a gender by the newspaper. 
 
 It was a big step for the Times, which still hasn’t settled on a definitive style for the word, Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke wrote in the New York Observer: 
 
 Asked about the use of Mx. (pronounced “mix”) in the Times back in June, standards editor Philip B. Corbett seemed to be taking a wait and see approach to the word. “I don’t think we’re likely to adopt Mx. in the near future,” Mr. Corbett told the Times. “It remains too unfamiliar to most people, and it’s not clear when or if it will emerge as a widely adopted term.” 
 
 Now comes word via Washington Post style sage Bill Walsh that Washington’s paper of record will allow employees to use “they” to refer to “people who identify as neither male nor female.” Here’s an excerpt from his memo to the newsroom: 
 
 It is usually possible, and preferable, to recast sentences as plural to avoid both the sexist and antiquated universal default to male pronouns and the awkward use of he or she, him or her and the like: All students must complete their homework, not Each student must complete his or her homework. When such a rewrite is impossible or hopelessly awkward, however, what is known as “the singular they” is permissible: Everyone has their own opinion about the traditional grammar rule. The singular they is also useful in references to people who identify as neither male nor female. 
 
 The Washington Post’s ruling is the latest salvo in a style dispute that has seen skirmishes between journalism greybeards on both sides. Earlier this year, the adoption of “they” as an acceptable pronoun surfaced several times during the annual American Copy Editors Society conference. My colleagues Kristen Hare and Lauren Klinger wrote about its potential for inclusion in The Associated Press stylebook, as well as its evolving usage in newsrooms across America. 
 
 Follow @BenMullin ||||| In 'The His'er Problem,' from her 1998 essay collection "Ex Libris," Anne Fadiman talks about using gender-neutral language in writing, and describes reading a sentence "by my beloved role model, E. B. White: 'There is one thing the essayist cannot do—he cannot indulge himself in deceit or concealment, for he will be found out in no time.' I felt the door slamming in my face so fast I could feel the wind against my cheek." Using "he" as the supposedly neutral pronoun is exclusionary, but what do you do about a phrase like "to each his own"? Using "his or her" feels unnecessarily clunky, but in her essay, Fadiman objects to using "their" as a singular neutral pronoun—"The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear," she writes. 
 
 While grammar sticklers might argue that it's totally incorrect to use "they" or "their" as a singular pronoun, Ben Zimmer, the executive editor of Vocabulary.com and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, points out that singular they has been in usage for more than seven centuries, "appearing in the work of writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Jane Austen." 
 
 Singular they was a major topic at the American Copy Editors Society's national conference in March, which I attended. (Yes, it was just as gloriously geeky as you might imagine.) Especially given the rising visibility of transgender and genderqueer individuals who might not use "he" or "she" as their pronouns, it feels less inclusive and accurate to use a "his or her" construction than "their." After that conference, City Paper changed its style guide to include "they" as an acceptable singular pronoun, when it can't be written around—"if readers are upset about the change, they can complain to the copy editor," for instance, instead of "if a reader is upset about the change, they can complain to the copy editor." 
 
 The conversation about singular they has continued (at least in copy-editing circles) throughout the year. John McIntyre from The Baltimore Sun has long been OK with singular they, and, as he pointed out in April, has for years allowed it in copy "without a peep of protest from readers." The Pittsburgh City Paper started using it in August after covering a gender-fluid musician who used "they" as their pronoun. "When this has come up before, our solution had always been to write around it when possible, often by eliminating any pronoun use," Editor Charlie Deitch wrote in a post announcing the change. "But that is difficult to do and ignores the greater issue at hand: Who am I to write around someone's identity just because it's tough to write in a news story?" 
 
 Singular they made news again recently, when Bill Walsh, who has been a copy editor at The Washington Post since 1997, wrote about the style changes he's implemented recently at the Post. "For many years, I've been rooting for — but stopping short of employing — what is known as the singular they as the only sensible solution to English's lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun," he writes. "What finally pushed me from acceptance to action on gender-neutral pronouns was the increasing visibility of gender-neutral people." Using language that's more accurately inclusive is something that every grammarian should be able to get behind, regardless of what pronouns they personally use. ||||| Starting today, you will no longer read about e-mail or Web sites in The Washington Post. Or open-mike nights or Wal-Mart. Here, as in much of the written-word world, you will see email and website and Walmart. Microphones will be mics. 
 
 Why did we wait so long to make the changes? As the keeper, more or less, of The Post’s style manual, I’ll tell you why: because the new spellings were wrong. 
 
 Mic arose from confusion over the difference between an abbreviation and a short form. Walmart arose from confusion over the difference between a name and a logo. The hyphenless email arose in a process seemingly familiar but actually unprecedented. (But website is fine. I don’t know why I made such a big deal about it all these years.) 
 
 Funny thing about language: Wrong doesn’t necessarily stay wrong. “Error is the engine of language change,” as David Shariatmadari wrote in the Guardian, “and today’s mistake could be tomorrow’s vigorously defended norm.” What’s more, yesterday’s vigorously defended norm can be today’s laughingstock. “WaPo’s shortened version of ‘microphone’ is ‘mike’ not ‘mic’. Has everyone gone crazy here?” our own Chris Cillizza tweeted in 2013. When I announced these style changes, another Twitter user wrote, “wait, it’s 2015 and there are still people who write e-mail?” 
 
 Not everyone is on Twitter, of course. For every online Post reader snickering at mike, there might be a longtime print subscriber baffled by mic. Because it would be impractical to edit each article separately for online and print audiences, we err on the conservative side. And, at the risk of inviting vigorous internal debate, I think The Washington Post, at least in hard-news stories, should read like the “publication of record” that it is. If I see a lead paragraph that would sound ridiculous in Walter Cronkite’s voice, that gives me pause. “POTUS got called out for walking back his pivot on the Grexit”? No. 
 
 But there comes a point when atoms of language change start to form molecules. Mic doesn’t exist in isolation. Some now-common phrases — mic drop, hot mic — would look downright anachronistic with the old spelling. That reality was what finally persuaded me to drop the mike from the Post stylebook. 
 
 Still, mic is an aberration. Words like that aren’t pronounced like that. A bicycle is a bike, not a bic. Bic, as in the pens, rhymes with Mick. So do hic and Nic and pic and Ric and sic and tic and Vic. That’s how short forms work: They’re intended to be pronounced, and so they’re spelled phonetically. You don’t just start subtracting letters until you’re left with something approximate. A refrigerator is a fridge; frig is a mild curse word that rhymes with pig. 
 
 Electronic recording devices, from the cassette recorders on which my brothers and I imitated Johnny Carson to more modern contraptions, have microphone jacks labeled MIC. It’s an abbreviation, never intended to be pronounced as a word, like Chas and Robt and Wm in a phone book. 
 
 Nevertheless, enough people made the error that mic gradually crept into the language. If you search the Nexis database for “open mike night” and “open mic night,” you’ll find three mics alongside 343 mikes in all recorded English-language news before 1993. The numbers stay lopsided in favor of mike into the early years of the 21st century, until mic finally overtakes it in 2005. Was it really that crazy for a newspaper to reject the mistaken spelling? 
 
 As a purist, I’m still not happy about mic. As a pragmatist, I feel I have to accept it. At least at work, that is. On my own time, you could say I’ve built a second career on ranting against language developments I consider unfortunate. In my first book, “Lapsing Into a Comma,” I called email “an abomination.” That was 15 years ago, but I’m still surprised anyone ever thought to write the word that way. 
 
 While it’s true that commonly used two-word or hyphenated compounds often solidify into single words over time, that had never before happened with a compound based on a single letter. We had T-shirts and X-rays for a long time before electronic mail showed up, but we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays. 
 
 For whatever reason, though, e-mail quickly became email as America went online. For years I braced for the day when a higher-up at The Post would banish the hyphen, especially after the Associated Press, the arbiter of style for most other U.S. publications, followed its 2010 website change with a 2011 move to email. But the order never came. A reporter would make the suggestion every once in a while, and the Twitterverse occasionally weighed in, but my bosses and their bosses seemed content with the status quo. I resolved to resist at least until the New York Times followed the AP’s lead. When that happened — on both terms, two years ago — I knew the change was inevitable. 
 
 As The Post has prepared for its move to a new building this month, I decided it was a good time to propose this batch of changes. Publication style is largely about consistency and polish, which in turn can represent credibility — if we can’t decide whether we use gray or grey, can you trust our attention to detail in stories about campaign finance or nuclear weapons? But it’s also about not looking weird, not distracting readers. E-mail, Web site, mike and Wal-Mart had begun to do so. 
 
 In 2008, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. changed its logo. Instead of WAL-MART in all caps with a star in place of the hyphen, it went with Walmart, conventionally capitalized, followed by an asterisk-like star. But the company remained Wal-Mart Stores Inc. 
 
 Rather than start writing about Wal-Mart and its Walmart stores, The Post chose to stick with the corporate name for both the company and the outlets. That new logo must have made an impression, because readers sure did notice the disconnect between the bright-blue signage and the intrusively hyphenated black-on-white Post rendition. They complained to reporters, and reporters complained to me. I told the reporters to tell Wal-Mart to change its name already. 
 
 It didn’t, but I found a loophole that allowed me to go with Walmart, now the predominant usage, in good conscience. The Post no longer routinely uses Inc., Corp., Co. and the like in company names. So we could keep Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on the rare occasion when we’d spell out the name, while otherwise referring to the company and its stores by the name everyone knows. 
 
 There was one change, though, that I knew would cause controversy. For many years, I’ve been rooting for — but stopping short of employing — what is known as the singular they as the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun. (Everyone has their own opinion about this.) He once filled that role, but a male default hasn’t been palatable for decades. Using she in a sort of linguistic affirmative action strikes me as patronizing. Alternating he and she is silly, as are he/she, (s)he and attempts at made-up pronouns. The only thing standing in the way of they has been the appearance of incorrectness — the lack of acceptance among educated readers. 
 
 What finally pushed me from acceptance to action on gender-neutral pronouns was the increasing visibility of gender-neutral people. The Post has run at least one profile of a person who identifies as neither male nor female and specifically requests they and the like instead of he or she. Trans and genderqueer awareness will raise difficult questions down the road, with some people requesting newly invented or even individually made-up pronouns. The New York Times, which unlike The Post routinely uses the honorifics Mr., Mrs., Miss and Ms., recently used the gender-neutral Mx. at one subject’s request. But simply allowing they for a gender-nonconforming person is a no-brainer. And once we’ve done that, why not allow it for the most awkward of those he or she situations that have troubled us for so many years? 
 
 I was a little surprised that the singular they has drawn stronger online reaction, both positive and negative, than the other style changes, especially because we are approaching it pretty cautiously. The stylebook entry retains the old advice to try to write around the problem, perhaps by changing singulars to plurals, before using the singular they as a last resort. 
 
 Even as we switch from distracting “normal people” (as Washingtonian magazine put it) with e-mail to distracting freaks like me with email, I suspect that the singular they will go largely unnoticed even by those who oppose it on principle. We’ve used it before, if inadvertently, and I’ve never heard a complaint. 
 
 Twitter: @TheSlot 
 
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– Jane Austen wrote, "To be sure, you knew no actual good of me—but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love." But had she submitted that line to a modern English teacher, she would have gotten docked for grammar. Instead of "when they fall in love," it should be "when he falls in love," or perhaps the clunkier "when he or she falls in love," right? That has long been the prevailing view, but after a slow and steady creep, that view seems to be disappearing. In fact, this year might be the tipping point for acceptance of the "singular they." Quartz, for example, has dubbed singular they its Word of the Year. And earlier this month, the Washington Post changed its style guide to accept it, though the guide still encourages reporters to first try to write around it by recasting the sentence as plural, notes Poynter. So, "All students must complete their homework, not Each student must complete his or her homework," per the guide. But when that kind of rewrite is "impossible or hopelessly awkward," writers should employ the singular they. One big factor behind the shift—not just at the Post but in newspapers, online posts, and English classrooms across the country—is the increasing acceptance in society of those who identify as neither male nor female. The singular they solves the problem. (On a related note, the New York Times now permits "Mx." as a gender-neutral honorific in place of Mr. or Ms., notes Quartz.) Grammatical purists may protest, but they are simply wrong, writes English teacher Anne Curzan at the Chronicle for Higher Education. "There is nothing grammatically wrong with singular they other than the fact that people say there is something wrong with it," she writes, noting the similarity to the outdated rule, still enforced in places, about not splitting infinitives. Adds Anna Walsh at Baltimore's City Paper, "Using language that's more accurately inclusive is something that every grammarian should be able to get behind, regardless of what pronouns they personally use." (The Internet seems to have invented a preposition.)