The US dictionary, which has been in print for more than 150 years, said that look-ups for “they” increased by 313% in 2019 compared with the previous year, as the public investigated the word’s shifting use and its increasing prominence in the news.

“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,” said Merriam-Webster. “More recently, though, ‘they’ has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is non-binary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers.”