Subject
e
Object
em
Possessive
eir
Possessive (alone)
eirs
Reflexive
emself
Said like: ee / em / air / airz / em-SELF
Take they, them, their, theirs, themself and drop the th. What is left is the Spivak set: e, em, eir, eirs, emself. Because it is built from words you already know, most people can use it after hearing it once. It sounds like someone speaking quickly.
The set is named after Michael Spivak, a mathematician who used capitalised E, Em and Eir in a typesetting manual, and it was fixed in its lower-case, five-form shape by an online community in the early 1990s. The idea of dropping the th is older still, and a variant with ey as the subject word also exists. This page is about the e version.
In a sentence
E is on the early shift, so call em before nine.
Eir desk is the tidy one, and the messy one is not eirs.
E wrote the whole report emself over the weekend.
How to use them
- E takes the singular verb: "e is", "e has", "e was". This is the one place it differs from they, which it otherwise copies.
- Said aloud, e sounds like he without the h, which is how many people say he anyway in fast speech. If someone mishears, spell it out once: "e, as in they without the th."
- Em is the object ("I told em"), eir is the possessive determiner ("eir bag"), eirs the standalone possessive ("it is eirs"), emself the reflexive. Em and eir are the two you will use most.
- Ey/em is a sibling set with the same object and possessive forms and ey as the subject word. Ey was argued to be clearer in speech because it cannot be heard as he. Do not swap one for the other; ask which.
- In writing, a lone e at the start of a sentence looks like a typo to people who have not met it. It is not, and the person is used to that reaction. Carry on.
Ways to practise
- Read any paragraph that uses they for one person and say it with the th removed. That is the whole exercise. It works because you already know the shape.
- Practise e at the start of a sentence with a verb: "E is", "E does", "E went". The singular verb is the one habit you have to build.
- Type it. E, em and eir look odd on a screen before they sound odd in the mouth, and most of this person's life happens in text.
Where it came from
On record. In 1975 Christine Elverson won a Chicago Association of Business Communicators contest with ey, em and eir, made by dropping the th from they, them and their. The mathematician Michael Spivak used capitalised E, Em and Eir in his AMS-TeX manual The Joy of TeX (written in 1983, published 1986). In May 1991 the programmer Roger Crew added "spivak" as a gender setting on LambdaMOO, and the game began referring to those players as e, em, eir, eirs, emself, which is the set used today.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between e/em and ey/em?
Only the subject word. Ey/em comes from Christine Elverson's 1975 contest entry; e/em is the version popularised through Spivak's manual and LambdaMOO. Everything after the first word is the same: em, eir, eirs, emself. Use whichever the person uses.
Why is it called Spivak if he did not invent it?
Because the name stuck where the set was used. LambdaMOO's gender setting was literally called "spivak" after the manual's author, and the players who chose it carried the name with them. Spivak used the capitalised forms in a book about typesetting; the community turned them into a pronoun set for people.