We toss around “he,” “she,” and “they” like they've always been part of the English language, but only one of them, the pronoun "he,” actually dates back to the earliest form of English. The others? They’re linguistic newcomers with fascinating backstories involving mistaken identities, Vikings, and the evolution of gender in English's grammar. The story behind these tiny words might just change how you see them.

In the days of Old English, the default third person pronoun was the masculine form “hē,” since, in Old English, nouns and pronouns required grammatical gender marking just as historically related German does today. Masculine forms were always used as the default forms. So, in Old English, “hē” was used to refer to a male person or whenever the sex of the person referred to was unknown.

To refer to a female person (what in modern English would be “she”), Old English used a feminine derivative of this masculine form, namely “hēo.” Likewise,........

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