/ʃiː/
[pronoun] Used to refer to a woman, girl, or female animal that has already been mentioned or is clearly known from context. It can also refer to things like ships or countries that are traditionally spoken of as female.
Nobody is fully sure where 'she' came from — it may have simply replaced an older word that sounded too much like 'he'.
The story of 'she' is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of the English language. Old English used the feminine pronoun 'hēo' to refer to women and girls, but somewhere around the 12th century, this word began to disappear from everyday speech in the north and east of England, and a new word — something that looked very much like 'she' — quietly took its place. The transition was so gradual and so unevenly recorded that scholars have debated for over a century exactly where this replacement word came from.
The most widely accepted theory is that 'she' developed from the Old English feminine demonstrative pronoun 'sēo', which meant 'that' or 'the' and was used to point to a specific female person, much the way we might say 'that woman over there.' Over time, 'sēo' shifted in pronunciation — the 's' sound moved forward in the mouth, the vowel changed, and the word gradually became 'she.' This kind of sound shift, where a demonstrative pronoun evolves into a personal pronoun, is well documented in other languages, so the idea is linguistically respectable.
A second theory, less popular but not entirely dismissed, suggests that 'she' may have been borrowed or influenced by Old Norse. The Vikings who settled in large parts of northern and eastern England during the 9th and 10th centuries spoke a language with feminine pronouns like 'sjá' and 'sú', and these may have blended with Old English forms in the mouths of bilingual communities. The regions where 'she' appears earliest in written records happen to overlap significantly with areas of heavy Norse settlement, which is suggestive, though not conclusive.
A third and rather elegant explanation focuses on a practical problem of speech. By the 12th century, the Old English masculine pronoun 'hē' (meaning 'he') and the feminine 'hēo' had come to sound so similar in ordinary fast speech that confusion between them was becoming common. It is possible that speakers naturally reached for a more distinct alternative to avoid misunderstanding — and that whichever form 'she' came from, it succeeded precisely because it sounded nothing like 'he.' Language, in this view, is always solving its own problems.
Whatever its origins, 'she' was firmly established in written English by the 13th century, appearing in texts from the East Midlands and spreading steadily southward and westward. The old form 'hēo' lingered in some western dialects for another century or two, but 'she' ultimately won out across the whole language. Today it is one of the most frequently used words in English, and its very ordinariness makes it easy to forget that it arrived as a newcomer — an outsider that ousted a word which had served English speakers for centuries. That an everyday pronoun could have such a murky and contested history is a reminder of how much of language evolves in the unrecorded mouths of ordinary people, long before anyone thought to write it down.