He

Part of speech: pronoun

Definitions

1. A pronoun used for a male person or animal already mentioned or understood ; a male individual, especially a man, boy or male creature
2. The third-person pronoun for a male person or animal named earlier ; a male human or creature, often contrasted with a female
3. Used as a subject to refer back to a male being already identified ; a male person or animal, particularly when sex is being noted

Etymology: The pronoun "he" is one of the oldest-looking words in English, and its roots run deep into the Germanic family. It is cognate with Scots "he", West Frisian "hy", Dutch "hij" and German dialect "her", and in the older Germanic languages it shared a stem with a demonstrative meaning "this", seen in the reconstructed Gothic form that meant "this". The sense was less a plain third-person marker than a pointing word, which is why the same root produced both a pronoun and a demonstrative. The most surprising twist is that the letters h and e here are not the product of an English sound change alone. The word's spelling and shape have been tied to Semitic letters in scholarly transliteration, since the Hebrew letter "he" and related Semitic signs are rendered with this same two-letter form. That connection is one of spelling and convention, not a shared ancestry: the English pronoun grew out of the Germanic stem, and the Semitic link simply reflects how those letters are written in Latin script.

Antonyms: she