Today, gender in English is commonly thought of as having the following characteristics – see for instance Huddleston & Pullum (2002): 1. English has gender;2. it has three genders: the masculine, the feminine and the neuter;3. gender is not a fixed property of at least a number of nouns. For instance, bull can be found with he or it;4. gender selection relies partly, but not solely, on sex – so that a male, e.g. a bull, can be referred to as it;5. the parts of speech that carry gender are chiefly the personal pronouns he, she, it (and their derivatives) and the relative pronouns which and who.A study of older English grammars, however, shows that not a single one of these characteristics has been permanent in descriptions:1. the existence of a gender category was rejected by a few 20th-century grammarians (e.g. Kruisinga & Erades 1960, Leech & Svartvik 1994) as well as by some recent cross-linguistic studies (Aikhenvald 2000, Creissels 2006)i;2. the number of genders in English grammatical descriptions varies from 7 to 2 between the 16th and early 20th centuries (e.g. 7 for Poole 1646, 6 for Bullokar 1586 and Jonson 1640, 5 for Howell 1661, 4 for Miège 1688 or Nesfield 1924, 2 for Ash 1760 or Bain 1873, and of course 3 for many grammarians, as early as Gil 1621). Mid-20th century structuralist grammars define a much higher number of gender classes (e.g. 10 for Quirk et al. 1985), and more recently, Biber et al. (1999: 312) propose four: masculine, feminine and dual (e.g. the doctor can be found in association either with he or she), all subsumed under the label “personal/human”, and “non-personal/neuter” (e.g. the house is found with it);3. all descriptions down to the turn of the 21st century define the gender of English nouns, but Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 488) consider that English nouns do not themselves carry gender;4. in many 19th-century grammars, gender is defined solely with regards to sex, as in Morgan (1814): “[g]ender is the distinction of the male sex from the female”ii;5. as for the parts of speech that carry gender, while all grammars include he and she, some reject it, others include I / you, relative that, interrogative who and what, adjectives, or compounds in -body and -thing (e.g. somebody, something).As the analysis of all five aspects would go far beyond the scope of a single study, the present contribution will focus on the last one, viz. the identification of the parts of speech that carry gender. The aim is twofold: contribute to a better knowledge of older grammatical descriptions of gender, and identify some factors that influence theorisation and its evolution.