Neopronouns Explained: Ze, Xe, and Beyond

A neopronoun is any third-person pronoun beyond the ones a language already hands you. In English that means anything that is not he, she, they or it, used for a person.

That is the whole definition. There is no committee that approves them and no register you sign. Some sets have been in print for over a century. Some were coined last year on a forum by one person, for one person.

The reason they exist is simple, and it is the reason this site exists. For some people, he and she are both wrong, and they is a compromise rather than an answer. A neopronoun is an attempt to have a word that says the specific thing rather than the nearest available thing.

Two clarifications before anything else. Using a neopronoun tells you nothing about what someone's body is doing or who they love. And neopronouns are not the same as singular they. They is an old English word; a dictionary adding the non-binary sense is a recent event, but the word is not. Neopronouns are the newer, smaller, more deliberate cousins.

Hundreds of sets exist. In practice you will meet a handful, and the ones with pages on this site cover almost everything you will hear in a year.

The forms below are the common shapes. Individuals sometimes run variants — a different possessive, a different reflexive — and the person's own version beats any table, including this one.

The loudest claim about neopronouns is that they were invented last Tuesday. They were not, and knowing the history takes the heat out of the room.

In 1858 an American composer, Charles Converse, proposed thon as a gender-neutral pronoun, borrowed from a Scots word meaning that one. It went into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1934 and stayed there until 1961. Ze turns up as a gender-neutral English pronoun in 1864. A daily newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, used hir in print for around twenty-five years across the 1920s to 1940s.

The Spivak set — e, em, eir — is named after a mathematician, Michael Spivak, who used it throughout a typesetting manual in the 1980s. In 1991 a programmer added spivak as a gender setting on LambdaMOO, one of the early text-based online worlds, and to his surprise it caught on. Kate Bornstein used ze and hir in a novel in 1996. The Oxford English Dictionary added ze in 2018 and hir and zir in 2019.

So the pattern is not "a fad from social media". It is a century and a half of people bumping into the same gap in the language and patching it. What social media changed is that the patches now spread between people instead of dying in one book.

Ask a hundred people why they use a neopronoun and you get a short list of honest reasons, none of which is attention.

None of them is a requirement, either. Plenty of people try a set, find it does nothing for them, and go back to they. That is a result, not a failure.

People say "I keep getting it wrong" as if it were a moral problem. It is a practice problem, and practice problems have boring solutions.

The mistake most people make is trying to learn a set by reading it. Pronouns live in the mouth, not the eye. You have to say them.

Most people are fluent in a set within a few weeks of actually using it. The people who are still struggling a year on are almost never struggling with the word.

You will slip. Everyone slips, including people who have used the set for years, including the person whose set it is.

A slip is not the problem. The apology loop is. You get it wrong, you stop, you apologise, you explain that you are trying, you apologise again, and now the person has to comfort you about their own pronoun. That is the thing people dread, far more than the slip.

The fix is a single move: say the right word, and keep going. "She — xe said it would be fine." No pause, no speech. If you feel you owe an apology, make it later, once, in private, and short.

The other mistake that matters is making it a performance. Announcing loudly that you are using the pronoun. Correcting other people on the person's behalf when they did not ask you to. Bringing it up at the table to show you are on the right side. The person wanted a word used quietly, and instead they are the subject again.

Of all the sets, it/its is the one that people who are otherwise fine with all this find hardest, and it is worth saying why.

For most English speakers, it is the word for objects and animals, and it has been used at people as a way of stripping them of personhood. So when someone asks you to use it for them, everything you were taught says no.

Two things hold at once. It is never a word you choose for someone else. And when a person chooses it for themselves, it is theirs, for reasons that range from reclaiming an insult to the plain fact that person-shaped words do not fit them.

You do not have to understand the reason to use the word. You will find it strange for a while. Say it anyway, and notice that the strangeness fades faster than you expected.

Some sets are built from a noun: vamp/vampself, kit/kitself, star/starself. They came out of online communities in the early 2010s and they are the ones that get screenshotted for mockery.

Here is the honest position. They are real pronouns used by real people, mostly young, mostly online, often alongside a more conventional set for offline life. They are also the sets you are least likely to be asked to use at work, and the ones most likely to be a period rather than a permanent choice.

If someone asks you to use one, the rule is the same as for every other set: say the word, keep going. If you find it genuinely difficult, say so once, kindly, and ask whether they have a set they use in mixed company. Most people do. That is not a compromise on their part. It is the same thing you do when you use one pronoun set at home and another at the office.

Nobody puts this part in the explainers, and it is where neopronouns actually cost something.

Most systems offer he, she, they and sometimes a free-text field. Most do not. So a person using xe/xem is choosing, every time a form appears, between they as the nearest box, the free-text field if it exists, and leaving it blank. That is an admin decision made a dozen times a week, and it is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with certainty.

Email signatures out you to everyone on the thread, including the difficult client. Some people put a neopronoun in internal mail only and they/them on the external signature. Some put the name and nothing else. All of these are normal.

Languages with grammatical gender are a different problem entirely. An English neopronoun does not carry over, and the local community has usually worked out its own solutions — a plural, a new ending, a name-only convention. What works varies by language and by country, and nobody from one language can tell you what applies in yours.

If you use a neopronoun, or you use one for someone you love, the reactions sort into types faster than you would like.

Whichever type you get, ask for behaviour, not belief. "Use xe for me at work" is something a person can do on Monday. Agreeing with you about language is not, and you do not need it.

Then try one somewhere disposable before you tell anyone.

A game handle. A new account nobody you know can see. A friend who will use it for one evening. Say it out loud alone first, which is more revealing than most people expect. The question is not whether it feels odd while it happens — everything new does. It is how you feel an hour later, on the bus, thinking about nothing.

Notice which direction the flinch goes. Some people try ze, feel ridiculous, and learn something useful: that they is fine after all. Some try it and feel a click, and then spend the next week certain they invented the click. Both are ordinary. Keep a dated note and read it in a month.

And a word on the numbers, because you will see them thrown around. In its 2020 online survey of LGBTQ young people aged 13 to 24, the Trevor Project found that four per cent of those surveyed used neopronouns. That is a small share of a specific group, in one year. It tells you neopronouns are uncommon. It tells you nothing about whether one is yours.

The first fortnight is exciting. Someone gets it right and something in you unclenches.

Then the plateau. Six weeks in, the set is just your set, and underneath it is ordinary life, which is still ordinary. A pronoun was never going to fix your job or your sleep.

There is also a specific tiredness that comes with neopronouns and not with they: the teaching. Every new colleague, every form, every doctor. Some people find after a year that the cost is too high for the return, and go back to they in public while keeping the set for friends. That is not retreat. It is pricing.

And the morning after the good one — someone uses the set perfectly, you feel nothing, and decide you made it up. Do not act on that verdict the same day.