he
pron.pron. the word you use to talk about a male person or animal that you have already mentioned. You use it as the subject of a sentence.
pron. the third-person singular masculine nominative pronoun. Used as the subject of a verb to refer to a male person, animal, or occasionally a personified object. The corresponding object form is 'him' and possessive is 'his'.
He is my brother.
When my dad gets home, he usually makes dinner for the whole family.
Although he had never visited London before, he managed to find his way to the hotel using only a paper map and a few words of English.
For Spanish speakers
Spanish is a null-subject language where the pronoun is omitted when the subject is clear from the verb ending. In English, 'he' must be explicitly stated as the subject of the sentence, or the phrase will be grammatically incomplete.
For Mandarin speakers
In spoken Mandarin, the pronouns for 'he', 'she', and 'it' are all pronounced exactly the same as 'tā'. Because there is no auditory distinction in the L1, speakers frequently substitute 'he' for 'she' or vice versa in spontaneous English speech.
For Japanese speakers
In Japanese, subject pronouns are frequently omitted when the referent is understood from context, a feature known as pro-drop. Consequently, learners often produce fragments like 'Is a doctor' instead of 'He is a doctor' because the Japanese sentence '彼は医者です (kare wa isha desu)' would more naturally be spoken as '医者です (isha desu)'.
For French speakers
French has no /h/ phoneme, leading speakers to omit the aspiration and pronounce the word as /iː/. This often causes confusion with 'eat' or the letter 'E'.
Last updated May 20, 2026