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I was reading A Study in Scarlet yesterday and noticed the following sentence:


I'm not a native English speaker, when I first saw "their being" I thought it was a typo, and the correct spelling would be "they're [they were] being followed", then I realized the word being was actually the noun, not the verb, that made sense, but I couldn't recall ever seeing this "version" of the expression used. I mostly see "they're being followed", "he's being followed", etc.

With the story being over 200 years old (first published 1887), I assumed this was an old expression that was replaced in later years with the common "they're being", Google Ngram viewer shows a general decrease in use of "their being followed" over the last 300 years, vs a slight increase of "they're being followed" since the 1960's, with the latter form overtaking the former during the mid-1990's.

My question is, is the latter form basically a "mistake" emerging from a typo that was later "accepted"? Or was this caused because th common usage of the word "being" changed from a noun to a verb over the years?

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I seldom user English.SE so feel free to re-tag my question if you feel it's tagged inappropriately –  JohnoBoy Mar 3 '13 at 8:52
Your assumption that the two are alternative forms of the same construction has made this essentially unanswerable. Please look up gerund and start again (the question might fit better on ell.stackexchange.com, the site for English language learners). –  TimLymington Mar 3 '13 at 9:13
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2 Answers

This is not a mistake and it is perfectly fine to use such expression even in the modern days (it is more common to see it in formal writing though). In short, there is nothing wrong with having a verb in gerund form be used after a possessive determiner.

Here is an extract from a Wikipedia article.

Gerunds preceded by a genitive


We enjoyed their [genitive] singing.



Using the possessive case with the gerund is applicable in all situations. For instance:

He affected my going there.

He affected your going there.

He affected his/her/its going there.

He affected our going there.

He affected their going there.

He affected Mary's going there.






However, the usual accusative is a less formal alternant. In a few situations, the genitive becomes redundant. For instance,

He objected to the girl being appointed the President. (Alternatively, He objected to the girl's being appointed the President.) We were delighted at Paul being awarded the prize. There is no chance of the snow falling. (Not, There is no chance of the snow's falling.)


The expression of they're being followed is simply not grammatical. Either use of them or of theirs, remove the of, or replace it with that.

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The language hasn't changed, and there's no mistake here. The key is the word of.

Doyle could have written:

There is some chance they're being followed.

however, with the preposition there, that would not read right:

There is some chance of they are being followed.

The correct way to say that would be:

There is some chance of them being followed.

Look what happens to your Ngram when the word of is included in the two expressions:

modified Ngram

As for why the numbers are decreasing, I think that's simply due to the fact that there were very few instances to begin with. When the vertical axis has numbers as small as 0.00000012%, it doesn't take too many additional instances of the expression before the number found by Google books doubles or triples for a certain year.

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