SC Misconception #5 – ‘Everbody should take care of their books’ is incorrect

This article is a part of a series of articles on SC Misconceptions. In this series, I’m going to address many misconceptions prevalent among GMAT aspirants.

The misconception addressed in this post is:

‘Everybody should take of their books’ is an incorrect sentence.

The reason given to reject the above sentence is that ‘their’ is a plural pronoun while ‘everybody’ is singular. Thus, singular pronouns ‘he’ or ‘she’ should be used.

The problem is that this reasoning is outdated. All top dictionaries allow ‘they’ to be used with a singular antecedent to refer to an unknown or unspecified person. Here’s one of the uses of ‘they’ from the Oxford dictionary:

[singular] Used to refer to a person of unspecified gender.
‘ask someone if they could help’

You can read the definition of ‘they’ from the other dictionaries as well:

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they
2. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/they
3. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/they

If you find this very new, you’re not alone. This use of ‘they’ is very new; rather, it is so new that OG 2019 (Page #679) says:

The reasoning surrounding such usage and the alternatives (he, she, she or he, she/he) is complex and evolving. You should not expect to see questions that require you to judge which usage is preferable.

In essence, you’ll not be tested on this concept. Thus, no need to worry 🙂 However, as you see, rejecting an option entirely on the basis of this use of ‘they’ is not a good idea.

I’d like to clarify that in this article, we talked about the use of they, their, and them w.r.t. referring to a person of unspecified gender. If the gender is known, ‘they’ (,them, or their) cannot be used to a singular person. In addition, ‘they’ (,them, or their) cannot be used to refer to singular things since things do not have a gender! For example, the following sentences are undoubtedly wrong:

1. A female gymnast is expected to take care of their belongings. (‘their’ is wrong since we know the gender of the person ‘female’)
2. I am planning to buy a laptop since they are very cheap these days. (‘they’ cannot refer to a singular thing ‘a laptop’)