/hiː/
[pronoun] A word used to refer to a male person or animal that has already been mentioned or is easy to identify. It is also sometimes used in a general way to refer to any person.
The tiny word 'he' has stayed almost unchanged for over a thousand years, surviving every revolution in the English language.
The word 'he' is one of the oldest words in the English language, stretching back to Old English, the form of English spoken before roughly 1100 AD. In Old English, the masculine singular pronoun was written as 'hē' — almost identical to how we write and say it today. This remarkable stability makes 'he' one of the most conservative words in the entire English vocabulary, a living fossil that connects modern speakers directly to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors.
Before Old English, we have to travel back to Proto-Germanic, the ancestor language spoken by the peoples of northern Europe perhaps three thousand years ago. Linguists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form as something like *hi- or *hiz, a demonstrative root that pointed to something nearby or already known. This same root gave rise to the pronoun 'he' in other Germanic languages: Old High German 'er', Old Norse 'hann', and Gothic 'is' all share the same deep family connection, like cousins who grew up in different countries and gradually stopped resembling each other.
Go back even further and you reach Proto-Indo-European, the ancient ancestor of an enormous family of languages stretching from Iceland to India. The root *ki- or *ko- was used to indicate nearness — something like 'this one here'. This demonstrates that 'he' began not as a true pronoun but as a pointing word, a kind of linguistic finger jabbing toward a specific person. Over thousands of years, this demonstrative gesture slowly hardened into a dedicated pronoun with its own fixed grammatical role.
In Old English, the pronoun system was far more complex than it is today. 'Hē' was specifically masculine, and it had different forms depending on its role in a sentence — 'hine' for the object form (what we now call 'him'), and 'his' for the possessive. Middle English gradually simplified this system, dropping many of the old case endings as the language became less inflected. The form 'hē' shortened and settled into the modern 'he', while related forms like 'him' and 'his' survived into modern English carrying traces of that older, richer grammar.
For centuries, 'he' was also used in English as a so-called 'generic' pronoun — a way of referring to any person of unknown sex, as in 'Everyone should do his best.' This usage was taught as a grammatical rule in schools from the 18th century onward, though it was frequently contested. By the late 20th century, singular 'they' had become a widely accepted alternative for gender-neutral reference, and 'he' began retreating to its more specific role referring to male individuals. Today the word sits at the centre of lively debates about language, identity, and inclusion — extraordinary territory for a two-letter word with roots in the Stone Age.