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Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun derived from plural they. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent , to refer to an unknown person, or to refer to every person of some group, in sentences such as:
Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
Examples include study groups, sports teams, schoolmates, attorney-client, doctor-patient, coworkers, etc. Cooley had made the distinction between primary and secondary groups, by noting that the term for the latter refers to relationships that generally develop later in life, likely with much less influence on one’s identity than primary groups.
Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē, which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun.
However, there are a few prefixes in English that are class-changing in that the word resulting after prefixation belongs to a lexical category that is different from the lexical category of the base. Examples of this type include a-, be-, and en-. a-typically creates adjectives from noun and verb bases: blaze (noun/verb) > ablaze (adj).