[quote=@Heroic] M249 SAW. [/quote] What now? [quote=@whizzball1] It's not safe to assume the rest of them used "his" as a gender-neutral singular if there are no references that use "his" as a gender-neutral singular. I'm saying that we have a reference of "their" being used as a gender-neutral singular in Chaucer, but there are no references of "his" used like that, so it's actually much safer to assume that "their" was the common usage, at least with the knowledge that we have at the moment. You might say that we can look into somewhat later English literature to find uses of "he/his" and "they/their" as a gender-neutral singular and weigh which one is used most often, and I'll point to the many examples of "they/their" as the gender-neutral singular by respected writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and the lack of examples of the other. I was considering mentioning that, but I thought you would note that that corresponds to our use of "it". In fact, in Middle and Old English, nouns actually did have genders, so the neuter pronoun "hit" corresponded to nouns considered neuter, not both masculine and feminine. As an aside, I'll cite Susanne Wagner in "Gender in English Pronouns: Myth and Reality" where she states that "there was an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun (him) said nothing about the gender of the referent." This could be taken to mean that "him" referred to both males and females, but her next statement clarifies: "It could be masculine, male, neuter, or asexual..." No mention is made of "him" ever referring to females. Therefore, even though you could perhaps say that the neuter "hit" is related to the masculine "him", you could not say in any capacity that either was related to the feminine "sche[o]". Therefore, we're back to the challenge of finding a gender-neutral singular pronoun that referred to both females and males. [/quote] First correction: no uses that you are aware of. An all-encompassing blanket statement is often false. My point is that I'm not going to dig through old books to find it because it's not worth the effort, and people actually did put in the work to find "they" in older literature. But if you can only account for one or two instances, it is likely that the rest are the alternate form. If it happened to be common throughout those works, nobody would bother to go and find each instance because they would be abundant. As I said and cited, it corresponds to "his," despite being neutral. The neutral term merged with a masculine one. Previous statement. There's an issue with that argument. In the case that's mentioned, the gender is known, rendering the gender neutral term useless. However, if it's related to someone who made a food, it would be understood that the term is gender neutral if, for example, the statement was "Give my regards to whoever made the food, for he did a good job." If we knew that the host's wife made it, we wouldn't use he, similar to why we don't use it when referring to childbirth.