Melissa Locker is reporting for Time magazine Merriam-Webster announced December 10, it has chosen “they” as the 2019 word of the year. The singular “they” is a pronoun used to refer to a person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a word that itself was added to the Merriam-Webster's online dictionary in September. The gender neutral pronoun is used in place of “he or she.” While “they” may be increasingly common in modern language, its use as a singular pronoun is not new. As Merriam-Webster writes, “English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.” Read the full story in Time magazine.