The Spivak pronouns are a proposed set of gender-neutral pronouns in English popularized by LambdaMOO based on pronouns used by Michael Spivak. Though not in widespread use, they have been employed in gender-neutral language by some people who dislike the more common alternatives "he/she" or singular they.
Two variants of the Spivak pronouns are in use, highlighted in the declension table below.
| Subject | Object | Possessive Adjective | Possessive Pronoun | Reflexive | |
| Masculine | he laughs | I hugged him | his heart warmed | that is his | he loves himself |
| Feminine | she laughs | I hugged her | her heart warmed | that is hers | she loves herself |
| Singular they | they laugh | I hugged them | their heart warmed | that is theirs | they love themself |
| Elverson (1975) | ey laughs | I hugged em | eir heart warmed | that is eirs | ey loves emself |
| MacKay (1980) | E laughs | I hugged E | Es heart warmed | ||
| Spivak (1983)[1] | E laughs | I hugged Em | Eir heart warmed | ||
| LambdaMOO “spivak” (1991)[2][3] | e laughs | I hugged em | eir heart warmed | that is eirs | e loves emself |
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In 1975, Christine M. Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, won a contest by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators to find replacements for "she and he", "him and her", and "his and hers". Her "transgender pronouns" ey, em, and eir were formed by dropping the "th" from they, them, and their.[4]
The May 1980 issue of American Psychologist reported on a study by Donald G. MacKay, testing rates at which subjects miscomprehended the gender of a subject in textbook paragraphs when written with he meaning he or she compared with three epicene pronoun sets: E, E, Es, Eself; e, e, es, eself; and tey, tem, ter, temself.[5]
In 1983, a mathematician-educator, Michael Spivak, wrote an AMS-TeX manual, The Joy of TeX (1983), using E, Em, and Eir. His set was similar to Elverson's, but capitalized like one of MacKay's sets. Writing in 2006, Spivak said:[6]
| “ | The original pronoun set was not created by me. I think I read about it in a newspaper clipping, perhaps from the Boston Globe, during the time I taught at Brandeis, and I believe it was credited to an anthropologist; later on, when I wanted to use it, I was unable to locate the source. In "The Joy of TeX", I wrote "Numerous approaches to this problem have been suggested, but one strikes me as particularly simple and sensible." I assumed people would figure that I was using a construction I couldn't properly credit, and not consider me so immodest as to praise my own invention (though I guess that was a rather immodest assumption). | ” |
In May 1991, a MOO programmer, Roger Crew, added "spivak" as a gender setting for players on LambdaMOO, causing the game to refer to such players with the pronouns e, em, eir, eirs, emself. The setting was added along with several other "fake genders" in order to test changes to the software's pronoun code, and was left in place as a novelty. To Crew's "dismay", the Spivak setting caught on among the game's players, while the other gender settings were mostly ignored.[7][8]
Other writers applied Elverson's original “th”-dropping rule and revived “ey”, such as Eric Klein in his legal code for a planned micronation called Oceania.[9] John Williams's Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ (2004) promoted the original Elverson set (via Klein) as preferable to other major contenders popular on Usenet (singular they, sie/hir/hir/hirs/hirself, and zie/zir/zir/zirs/zirself).[10]
Spivak is one of the allowable genders on many MUDs and MOOs. Others might include some selection of: masculine, feminine, neuter, either, both, "splat" (asterisk), plural, egotistical, royal, and 2nd. The selected gender determines how the game engine refers to a player.
On LambdaMOO, they became standard practice for help texts ("The user may choose any description e likes"), referring to people of unknown gender ("Who was that guest yesterday, eir typing was terrible"), referring to people whose gender was known but without disclosing it ("Yes I've met Squiggle. E was nice."), or of course characters declaring themselves to be of gender Spivak. In recent years (2000 onwards), this usage is declining.
Nomic games, especially on the Internet, often use Spivak pronouns in their rulesets, as a way to refer to indefinite players.[11]
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