He is a masculine third-person, singular personal pronoun (subjective case) in Modern English, as well as being a personal pronoun in Middle English.
Contents
People
"He" can be used as a substitution of a male's name.
Animals
"He" and "she" are often used to refer to domesticated animals and sometimes non-domesticated animals of the respective sex.
Gender neutral
A study has shown that "there was a rather 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 or sex of the referent."
The use of "he" to refer to a person of unknown gender was often prescribed by manuals of style and school textbooks from the early 18th century until around the 1960s, an early example of which is Ann Fisher's 1745 grammar book "A New Grammar".
This may be compared to usage of the word man to humans in general.
Gender-specific pronouns were also prescribed when one might presume that most members of some group are the same gender (although in recent times, such presumptions are sometimes seen as offensive).
Other
The pronoun He, with a universally capitalized H, is often used to refer to the Supreme Being, or in Christian contexts, to Jesus Christ; "It", with a capitalized I, is also used when speaking of the Supreme Being's nature or Godhead, or in Christian contexts, to refer to the Logos; capitalized "He" and "It" have both been used to refer to the Holy Spirit. In Catholic Christian circles, the Blessed Sacrament is also referred to with the capitalized pronoun "It".
Gender
The gender system in Modern English is generally natural, semantic and logical; however it is most similar to languages whose gender systems primarily distinguish between the animate and inanimate, and between the personal and impersonal. In the table RP stands for relative pronoun and PP for personal pronoun.
Notes: RP is relative pronoun and PP personal pronoun. Alternatives are presented in three ways:
slash (/) — used equally; above & below — first preferred; parentheses "()" — disputed or unusual usage.
Indo-European
The reconstructed Indo-European language provides a demonstrative pronoun ko.
Germanic
English is a development of the West Germanic language family.
Old English
Speakers of Old English (OE) considered each noun to have a grammatical gender — masculine, feminine or neuter. Pronouns were generally (but not always) selected to have the same grammatical gender as the noun they referred to. For example, dæg ([dæj] 'day') was masculine, so a masculine pronoun was used when referring to a day or days. The pronoun "he" was written he, as in Present-Day English (PrDE), but pronounced hē ([heː]), rather like PrDE hay.
Middle English
Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources due to difference in spellings and pronunciations. See Francis Henry Stratmann (1891). A Middle-English dictionary. [London]: Oxford University Press. and A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 TO 1580, A. L. Mayhew, Walter W. Skeat, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888.
There was one change to the inflection of the masculine pronoun in Middle English. The OE dative form him replaced the OE accusative hine [hinə]. This meant that, in Middle English, there was no distinction between masculine and impersonal, except in the subject case of the third-person singular, until it from hit replaced him in the object case of the impersonal. Some scholars believe that "there was rather 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 or sex of the referent."