Hirself

Part of speech: pronoun

Definitions

1. A gender-neutral reflexive pronoun used to refer back to a person, chosen by someone who does not identify as strictly male or female
2. A pronoun that replaces himself or herself when referring to an individual who prefers a gender-neutral form of self-reference
3. The reflexive pronoun used by some non-binary or gender-neutral people to refer to themselves in place of himself or herself

Etymology: Hirself is a pronoun built from two pieces that English already had: "hir," the objective and possessive form of the gender-neutral pronoun "ze" (or "zie") and the older "hir" used in many dialects as a form of "her," and "-self," the same ending found in "herself," "himself," and "itself." Put together, it follows the same pattern English uses for every reflexive pronoun, so the form is simply the expected one for a speaker who wants to refer back to a person whose pronouns are "ze/hir." Because the word combines a pronoun with "-self" in exactly the way "herself" and "himself" do, its shape tells you its job at a glance: it refers back to the subject of a sentence, as in "Sam taught hirself to knit." The reflexive ending did the grammatical work here, and the speaker only needed to supply a pronoun stem for the person in question.