itstheirtheir

Itstheirtheir is a coined term used in internet linguistics and natural language processing to describe a constructed string that blends common English pronouns and a contraction: it’s their their, written without spaces or punctuation. It is not a standard word in any language corpus, but rather a deliberate concatenation employed as a case study for pronoun usage and tokenization.

Origin and form: The term arises from discussions about pronoun agreement, the rise of singular they, and the boundaries between contractions and possessives. By removing spaces and apostrophes, itstheirtheir creates a challenging input for parsers and readers, highlighting how context, punctuation, and morphology influence interpretation.

Linguistic significance: Itstheirtheir serves as a compact prompt for examining pronoun antecedents, determiner use, and possessive forms within a single string. It underscores ongoing debates about how pronouns encode gender, number, and agreement, while illustrating how repeated pronouns interact in syntax and discourse.

Applications in technology and education: In natural language processing, itstheirtheir is used to test tokenizers, sentence boundary detectors, and coreference resolution systems under edge-case input. In language education, it can be used as an example of how punctuation and spacing affect readability and grammatical parsing.

Reception: Itstheirtheir is primarily of interest within niche linguistic and NLP communities as an illustrative artifact rather than a widely recognized term. It is discussed as a thought experiment rather than a canonical grammatical construction. See also: singular they, pronoun usage, tokenization, coreference.