Pronoun

In quiz bowl, the word pronoun is used to describe the words or phrases that refer to the answer in each clue of a question. This is a very broad interpretation of the standard English usage of the term.

pronoun (noun):

a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this).

—Oxford Languages

The pronoun typically includes the word "this", followed by the general category an answerline is in (e.g. "this person", "this composer"). Other terms used to represent this concept include designator, identifier, and indicator.

For example, in the sentence "In a novel titled for one of these animals, the protagonist claims that “prime numbers are like life,” explaining why they are used to number the book’s chapters." (taken from 2019 EFT), the phrases "these animals" and "they" function as pronouns, though only the former would typically be referred to as such in quiz bowl.

Older sets would often use very general pronouns like "he", "she", or simply "this", occasionally omitting any pronoun entirely. This made identifying what a question was asking for much more difficult and sometimes even impossible to do in their early portion. In modern quiz bowl, the use of overly general pronouns like "this thing" or "this entity" are typically avoided for similar reasons.