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By the end of 2019 Merriam-Webster announced the singular gender-neutral personal pronoun “they” the most frequently looked-up word of the year. In fact, the non-binary sense of this pronoun and its nonstandard reflexive form “themself” were added to the dictionary only a few months before, in September 2019. The aim of the paper is to analyse the lexicographic treatment of the singular pronoun “they” as well as its objective, possessive and reflexive forms a few years after the non-binary sense was entered in dictionaries. The paper will also briefly look at gender-neutral and non-binary pronouns recently added to the lexicons of other languages (see e.g., Renström, Lindqvist, & Gustafsson Sendén, 2021) and their lexicographic representation: “hen” in Swedish and Norwegian, “hen” (a borrowing from Swedish) and “xier” in German, ”hen” and “die” in Dutch, “iel” in French, and “elle” in Spanish. To account for gender fluidity, the present study has been conducted in the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics, where conceptual categories are viewed as non-discrete, and social concepts are not static, but gradable and dynamic (Geeraerts, 2016). The entries for they, them, their and themselves/themselves are examined in monolingual English online dictionaries, four monolingual learners’ dictionaries: Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, COBUILD Advanced English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) and three monolingual dictionaries for native speakers: one comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, and two standard ones Merriam Webster and Collins English Dictionary. In order to gain a wider perspective, the study also uses Google’s English Dictionary, the crowd-sourced Wiktionary and the latest innovation in lexicography, ChatGPT as a point of comparison for the information collected from the dictionaries. Two main components of the dictionary entry are subjected to scrutiny and evaluated: definitions and examples of usage, and in monolingual learners’ dictionaries, also usage notes, as these are of paramount importance when it comes to raising awareness of this significant socio-linguistic issue in a language that is not the mother tongue. Another criterion of analysis is the number of senses distinguished, their ordering and arrangement. It is checked if the nonbinary sense is lumped together with the gender-neutral one, or presented as a separate sense or subsense. It is also investigated if the non-binary sense is distinguished in the entries for all the inflected forms of the pronoun, or just the nominative form. Definitions of the gender-neutral sense of “they” are also analysed to see if they comprise only binary forms such as “he or she”, “him or her”, “his or her”, or “male or female” instead of opting for the more inclusive form, e.g., “a person”, or adding the third gender to the spectrum of possibilities. Additionally, the dictionary definitions of the words “gender” and “sex” are looked into, as these lexemes are often used in the definitions of the gender-neutral and non-binary senses of “they” and its forms. Moon (2014: 98) notes that all the big four online leaners’ dictionaries provide purely male-female binary explanations of gender, and she recognises the need for acknowledgement of changing sociocultural paradigms to be reflected in lexicographic definitions. As far as example sentences are concerned, it is investigated if examples of usage of the non-binary sense are presented, and if they contain the antecedent in the singular form to illustrate the singular reference of the pronoun, and if the form of the verb used after the anaphora clearly indicates that the verb must be plural, avoiding forms which might be ambiguous, such as past tense forms of verbs other than to be. The results indicate that the examined dictionaries are not equally inclusive regarding the treatment of the non-binary and gender-neutral senses of “they”, and some still follow the traditional distinction in defining “gender” or “sex”. In fact, ChatGPT turns out to provide explanation which is the most comprehensive regarding gender identity. As LGBTQIA+ people define themselves through language, it is the role of the dictionary to provide adequate and inclusive explanation of non-binary forms.
