He (pronoun)

"He" has always been the third-person masculine pronoun in English, as this table of the pronouns of Old English shows:

Although the pronoun has always been spelled the same, its Old English pronunciation was closer to that of modern "hay".

As the OE table shows, "hine" and "him" were respectively the accusative and dative cases of "he". These oblique forms persisted in Middle English:

Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources due to difference in spellings and pronunciations. See Francis Henry Stratmann (1891). A Middle-English dictionary. [London]: Oxford University Press. and A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 TO 1580, A. L. Mayhew, Walter W. Skeat, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888.

Hence in modern English the dative form "him" took on the accusative functions of accusative "hine" ([hinə]).

As in many languages, in Old English each noun had a grammatical gender (masculine, feminine or neuter), and a pronoun was generally (but not always) selected according to its antecedent's grammatical gender. Thus, because "dæg" ([dæj], 'day') was masculine, one would refer to the day as "he".[1][2] Since in Modern English nouns have no grammatical gender (though suffixes like "-or" or "-ess" may indicate the gender of their referents), only the gender of the referent determines the pronoun to use.

The generic "he" serves as a pronoun whose antecedent is any noun denoting a social category under which both sexes fall:

• A good student always does 'his' homework.
• If someone asks you for help, give it to 'him'.
• When a customer argues, always agree with 'him'.

Ann Fisher first prescribed the generic "he" in her 1745 grammar book A New Grammar. It was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until around the 1960s.[3]

When speaking of God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, some Christians use the capitalised forms "He", "His" and "Him" in writing, and in some translations of the Bible.