By Jeff Guo | The Washington Post
(Related: We no longer call a spade a spade)
Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.
In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over “thanks, Obama,” ammosexual, “on fleek,” and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year.
Singular they, which The Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: “Everyone wants their cat to succeed.”
