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She (pron-en ?i?) is a
third-person, singular
personal pronoun (subject case) in Modern English. In 1999, the American Dialect Society chose "she" as the word of the past millennium.
Modern English personal pronouns (table)
UsageThe use of she for I (also for you and he)
is common in literary representations of Highland English.
- " 'And here she comes,' said Donald, as Captain Dalgetty entered the hall." — Walter Scott, The Legend of Montrose iv (1819).
She is also used instead of it
for things to which feminine gender is conventionally attributed:
a ship or boat (especially in colloquial and dialect use),
often said of a carriage, a cannon or gun,
a tool or utensil of any kind,
and occasionally of other things.
She refers to abstractions personified as feminine,
and also for the soul, a city, a country, an army, the Church, and others.
- "Stanley had been ridiculing the habit of personifying the Church as a woman, and speaking of it tenderly as she." — George C. Brodrick, Memory and Impressions (1900) 252
- "With all the pompous titles ... bestowed upon France, she is not more than half so powerful as she might be." — The Annual Register III. Miscellaneous Essays (1760) 203
- "[1] told the Ambassadour, that the Turkes army was at Malta, and that she had saccaged the towne." — Thomas Washington tr
. Nicholay’s Voyages i. xiii. (1585) 14 b
Rarely and archaically, she referred to an immaterial thing without personification.
Also of natural objects considered as feminine, as the moon, or the planets that are named after goddesses;
also of a river (now rare), formerly of the sea, a tree, etc.
William Caxton in 1483 (The Golden Legende 112 b/2)
and Robert Parke in 1588 (tr. Mendoza’s Historie of the great and mightie kingdome of China, 340)
used she for the sun,
but this may possibly be due to misprint;
survival of the Old English grammatical gender can hardly be supposed,
but Caxton may have been influenced by the fact that the sun is feminine in Dutch.
She has been used for her,
as an object or governed by a preposition,
both in literary use (now rare),
or vulgarly, as an emphatic objective case.
- "I want no angel, only she." — Olive Schreiner Story African Farm ii. xiii. (1889) 284
- " 'I hope—our presence did not inconvenience—the young lady?' 'Bless your heart, sir! nothing ever inconveniences she'." — Miss Dinah Mulock Craik, John Halifax, gentleman x (1856).
She is also used attributively, applied to female animals, as in:
she-ass, -ape, -bear, -dog, -dragon, -sheep, -wolf, -lion a punning distortion of shilling, -stock, and -stuff the U.S. = cattle.
When applied to persons, it is now somewhat contemptuous,
as in she-being, -cousin, -dancer, -thief, and others.
She-friend meant a female friend, often in bad sense, that is, a mistress;
but she-saint, was simply a female saint.
Rarely she was also prefixed to masculine nouns in place of the (later frequent) feminine suffix -ess.
- "They took her for their Patroness, and consequently for their she God." — Daniel Brevint, Saul and Samuel at Endor, vii. (1674) 161.
It has also been prefixed to nouns with the sense "that is a woman", often in disparaging use but also with intensive force, as she-woman. Now it is somewhat rare:
- "Some she-malady, some unhealthy wanton, Fires thee verily." — Robinson Ellis, The poems and fragments of Catullus, vi. (1871) 4
- "Correlative to the he-man is the she-woman, who is equally undesirable." — B. Russell, New Hopes for changing World (1951) 162
OriginAccording to Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender:
In 1789, William H. Marshall records the existence of a dialectal English epicene pronoun, singular "ou": "'Ou will' expresses either he will, she will, or it will." Marshall traces "ou" to Middle English epicene "a", used by the 14th century English writer John of Trevisa, and both the OED and Wright's English Dialect Dictionary confirm the use of "a" for he, she, it, they, and even I. This "a" is a reduced form of the Anglo-Saxon he = "he" and heo = "she". By the 12th and 13th centuries, these had often weakened to a point where, according to the OED, they were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation." The modern feminine pronoun she, which first appears in the mid twelfth century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce the increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system…
Probably, the etymology of she derived from an alteration of the Old English feminine form of the demonstrative pronoun: seo 'that' one. In Middle English, the new feminine pronoun she seems to have been intentionally artificial, to fulfill the linguistic need.
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