In Standard Modern English, he has four shapes representing five distinct word forms:[1] Old English had a single third-person pronoun — from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *hi-, from PIE *ko- "this"[3] — which had a plural and three genders in the singular.
In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender-neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until the 1960s.
He's referents are generally limited to individual male persons, excluding the speaker and the addressee.
However, sometimes this can seem very unnatural, as in these examples: The dominant epicene pronoun in modern written British English is 'they'.
[9] When speaking of God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, some Christians use the capitalised forms "He", "His" and "Him" in writing, and in some translations of the Bible.