Definition of "he" [he]

• Used to refer to the man or boy previously mentioned or implied. (pronoun)
• Used to refer to a male animal. (pronoun)
• Usage Problem Used to refer to a person whose gender is unspecified or unknown: "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence” ( William Blake). (pronoun)
• A male person or animal: Is the cat a he? (noun)
• The fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. See Table at alphabet. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "“Oh, no, ” said he, “he [Lincoln] won’t enter into the Slave States to disturb the institution of slavery, —he is too prudent a man to do such a thing as that; he only means that he will go on to the line between the Free and Slave States, and shoot over at them."
• "  The only magazine he subscribed to,  he said,  wasScientific American, a publication that I had previously scorned as the trade journal of pre-med students and Nobel Prize winners."
• "What he couldn't tell the Captain, or any of his crew, was something that was so spleen bustingly obvious it gave him physical pain when he  realized  none of them knew why he had taken so long."