The one thing that unites almost every one of these solutions to the problem of our language’s seeming lack of an epicene third-person pronoun is that they have all failed to catch on.

For those who are interested in a spectacularly comprehensive list of gender-neutral pronouns which never quite caught on readers may turn to Dennis Baron’s magisterial treatment of the subject in American Speech in 1981 (“The Epicene Pronoun: The Word That Failed”), in which he documents over 100 proposed lexical items, dating in use back to the middle of the 19th century ( nim, talis, iro and ver are some of his findings). Sippell estimated that there had been approximately 80 suggested ways of saying 'him or her' or 'his or hers' in a single word that was not they or theirs. This list included, but was not limited to, hes, hiser, hem, ons, e, heer, he’er, hesh, se, heesh, herim, co, tey, per, na, en, herm, em, hir, and shey. In her Master’s thesis from 1991 ( Solving the Great Pronoun Problem), Kelly Ann Sippell provided an extensive list of gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns that had been proposed over the previous hundred and fifty years. Though the word was dropped for lack of use, other gender-neutral pronouns-'they', 'their', and 'them'-remain. 'Thon', short for 'that one,' appeared in our Unabridged dictionary from 1934-1961.

Third by Q. Kelly