American linguists on Friday chose "they" as their word of the decade, recognizing the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their sex as neither entirely male nor entirely female.
Separately, the American Dialect Society bestowed its honors for word of the year on the increasingly common practice of introducing oneself in correspondence or socially by the set of pronouns that one prefers to be called by — declaring in an email, for example, "pronouns: she/her."
The two awards were decided by some 350 members of the society at its annual meeting of academics, graduate students and word lovers who voted by a show of hands, said Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer who chairs the group's New Words Committee.