She

How to spell she

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce she

What does she mean?

1. pronounThe subject form used to refer to a female person or animal previously mentioned or easily identified.

She in a sentence

• She finished the report well before the deadline.

• After the meeting she drove straight to the airport.

Where does she come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word has a surprisingly tangled history. In Old English the feminine pronoun was heo, but during the early Middle English period that form began to clash awkwardly with the masculine he and other similar words, leaving speakers without a clear way to mark the difference. The modern form 'she' rose to replace it sometime in the 1100s and 1200s, and scholars still debate exactly how: one leading view is that it grew out of the Old English feminine demonstrative seo, meaning 'that one' or 'the', whose initial sound gradually hardened into the 'sh' we now use. By the late medieval period 'she' had spread across the country and settled into standard use. Because its origins are genuinely disputed, it is one of the few everyday English words whose precise development remains uncertain.

How the word is built

• she (single morpheme; subject personal pronoun, third person singular feminine)

Words that sound like she

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• shea: A West African tree whose nuts yield a fatty oil, used especially in the form of shea butter for skin care and cooking.