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I was reading an article to improve my English and I noticed that the writer wrote "no one raised their hand," so could you tell me if the sentence below is correct or not and why?
"I looked around the room, and there was an awkward silence. No one raised their hand."
You may be confused because "no one" is singular, but "their" is plural. Except it isn't. In recent decades "they" and "their" have been used increasingly for the singular when the gender of the antecedent is unknown or indeterminate. The traditional rule was to use the masculine gender in such cases, but people have been increasingly uncomfortable with that, for example with saying "no one raised his hand" when the group of people who didn't raise their hands includes both men and women.
It depends what you’re trying to say. If you’re trying to say that no hands went up while you were looking round the room, then “no one raised their hand” is correct. But if you want to say that while you were looking round the room you didn’t see any hands that had already gone up, it would be “no one had raised their hand”.
The singular usage of "they" is supported by respected American and English dictionaries.
You could escape from this particular argument by saying, "No-one raised a hand."
However I see nothing wrong with saying, "No-one raised their hand". Merriam-Webster explicitly allows this usage.
2: his or her : HIS, HER, ITS —used with an indefinite third person singular antecedent
anyone in their senses — W. H. Auden
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/their
Merriam-Webster is probably the most respected dictionary of American English.
Note that W.H. Auden was highly literate, a poet, who died September 29, 1973, so we are not talking about recent or uneducated usage.
Note: @Mike Scott has pointed out in a comment that The use of “they” as a singular dates back to the 14th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage
Here's the British usage from lexico.com, an offshoot of the famous Oxford Dictionaries.:
their
Belonging to or associated with a person of unspecified sex.
‘she heard someone blow their nose loudly’
‘Anyone who wants to voice their displeasure over that lot has to do a lot of voicing.’
etc.
It's a very common expression. Check this tweet, for example. So, to answer the question, yes, it's correct.
Also, you can simply say, "I looked around, and there was..."
No one raised their hand = No person raised his or her hand.
Yes, it's grammatically correct.
