gender definition

English gender definition

Alternative forms

• (grammar: grammatical gender): g. (abbreviation)

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈd͡ʒɛndə/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈd͡ʒɛndɚ/
• Rhymes: -ɛndə(ɹ)
• Hyphenation: gen‧der

Etymology 1

From Middle English gendre, gender (see also gendres), from Middle French gendre, genre, from Latin genus (“kind, sort”). Doublet of genre, genus, and kin. The verb developed after the noun.

Noun

gender (countable and uncountable, plural genders)

2. (obsolete) Class; kind. [14th–19th c.]
   • c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii]:

     […] plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many […]

4. (grammar) A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech) into masculine or feminine, and sometimes other categories like neuter or common, and animate or inanimate. [from 14th c.]
   • 1990, Edwin L. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language, →ISBN, page 73:

     The pronominal declension [of English], on which we will focus most of our attention, inflects pronouns for person, number, case, gender, animacy, and reflexivity.

   • 1991, Greville G. Corbett, Gender, →ISBN, pages 22 and 65:

     In Algonquian languages, given the full morphology of a noun, one can predict whether it belongs to the animate or inanimate gender […]

   • 2006, Viktor Elšik, Yaron Matras, Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample, →ISBN, page 29:

     Pronouns, for instance, are structures that organise information about continuous referents. This information is typically categorised in Romani according to Person, Number, Gender, Animacy, Case, and Discreteness.

   • 2015, Anna Giacalone Ramat, Paolo Ramat, The Indo-European Languages, →ISBN, page 191:

     The common gender might well reflect an IE animate gender.

6. (now sometimes proscribed) Sex (a category, either male or female, into which sexually-reproducing organisms are divided on the basis of their reproductive roles in their species). [from 15th c.]

   the gene is activated in both genders

   The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, gender, and other factors.

   • 1723, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter, 7 December:

     To say truth, I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex; and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them […] .

   • 1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC:

     In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse […] that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.

   • 2004, Wenona Mary Giles, Jennifer Hyndman, Sites of violence: gender and conflict zones, page 28:

     Gender does not necessarily have primacy in this respect. Economic class and ethnic differentiation can also be important relational hierarchies, […] .

   • 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Asari: Biology Codex entry:

     Although asari have one gender, they are not asexual. An asari provides two copies of her own genes to her offspring. The second set is altered in a unique process called melding.
     During melding, an asari consciously attunes her nervous system to her partner's, sending and receiving electrical impulses directly through the skin. The partner can be another asari, or an alien of either gender. Effectively, the asari and her partner briefly become one unified nervous system.

8. Identification as a man, a woman, or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc; a category to which a person belongs on this basis. (Compare gender role, gender identity.) [from 20th c.]
   • 1979 January 8, Merissa Sherrill Lynn, “Statement”, in Newsletter‎^[1], number 7, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1:

     I am a cross-dresser by pleasure and inclination, a transgenderal person. To me for human beings to express themselves along gender lines is a wonderful and uniquely human phenomena.

   • 1989, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Christine Roberts, “Sex, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Variance”, in Sandra Morgen, editor, Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching‎^[2], Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 439:

     Gender is the sociocultural designation of biobehavioral and psychosocial qualities of the sexes; for example, woman (female), man (male), other(s) (e.g., berdaches²). Notions of gender are culturally specific and depend on the ways in which cultures define and differentiate human (and other) potentials and possibilities. While many people in Western society may think first of heterosexual women and men when the word "gender" is mentioned, there are more gender possibilities than just those two.

   • 1998, Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle‎^[3], University of California Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 23:

     From simply "adding women" into the analysis of work and seeing "gender" as another word for "sex," we have moved to the understanding that gender is a social process and a social construction of sexual differences. It is as much an independent variable as a dependent variable, shaped by social and historical processes. Beyond bringing women back into analyses of the workplace and the labor process, we now have to analyze how work is gendered and gendering: gender as a means of control and an organizing principle for class relations at the point of production, and workplace as a site for gender construction, formation, and reproduction. In the latest development, seeing gender as a power process also directs our attention toward the politics of identity, or the formation and claiming of collective subjectivities.

   • 2007, Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, →ISBN, page 93:

     One wife I met at a conference was in a hurry for her husband to have the genital surgery because she worried about his gender and genitals not matching if he were in a car accident, […]

   • 2010, Eve Shapiro, Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age, →ISBN:

     Thomas Beatie, a transgendered man, announced in an April 2008 issue of the gay and lesbian news magazine, The Advocate, that he was pregnant. […] Moreover, he saw no conflict between his gender and his pregnancy.

   • 2012, Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories, page 5:

     Intersex people too challenge the idea that physical sex, not merely gender, is binary – a person must be definitively either one sex or the other.

10. (grammar) Synonym of voice (“particular way of inflecting or conjugating verbs”)
    • 1835, James Paul Cobbett, A Latin Grammar for the Use of English Boys: Being an Explanation of the Rudiments of the Latin Language, London, page 111:

      143. […] We have now to speak of the following eight particulars relating to verbs: Gender or Sort, Person, Number, Time, Mode, Participle, Gerund, and Supine. [...]
      1st.--Of the Gender.
      144. Gender means the same as sort or kind. There are four principal Sorts of Verbs; namely, Active verbs, Passive verbs, Neuter verbs, and Impersonal verbs.

    • 1866, Guðbrandr Vigfusson, “Some remarks upon the Use of the Reflexive Pronoun in Icelandic”, in Transactions of the Philological Society, page 87:

      Many of the words quoted are purely reflexive, others passive or deponent. Such words as óttask, œðrask, dásk, iðrask, reiðask are deponent, though they originally may have been reflexive, but the active gender is here quite obsolete.

    • 2007, Bernard Colombat, “Some Problems in Transferring the Latin Model to the First French Grammars: Verbal voice, impersonal verbs and the -rais form”, in Eduardo Guimarães, Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros, editors, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 110: History of Linguistics 2002, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 6:

      The general distinction is between three 'genders' out of the five genders of the Latin tradition: active gender, passive gender, neuter gender.

12. (hardware) The quality which distinguishes connectors, which may be male (fitting into another connector) and female (having another connector fit into it), or genderless/androgynous (capable of fitting together with another connector of the same type). [from 20th c.]
    • 2015, Ron Carswell, Shen Jiang, Mary Ellen Hardee, Guide to Parallel Operating Systems with Windows 10 and Linux, page 10:

      Connectors are identified by gender. When copper pins are exposed in the connector, its gender is male.

Usage notes

Sometimes, sex and gender are distinguished.

Synonyms

• (grammar, of verbs): voice
• (biological sex): sex
• (class or kind): genre
• (categorization): gendersex

Derived terms

Translations

See also

• (grammar) common, feminine, masculine, neuter
• (sex) female, male, hermaphroditic; man, woman, hermaphrodite
• genderqueer, bigender, non-binary, transgender, androgyne, crossdresser, hijra, kathoey, transsexual, two-spirit

Verb

gender (third-person singular simple present genders, present participle gendering, simple past and past participle gendered)

1. (sociology) To assign a gender to (a person); to perceive as having a gender; to address using terms (pronouns, nouns, adjectives...) that express a certain gender.
   • 2011, Kristen Schilt, Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, page 147:

     In an interview, he even noted that he "dressed, acted and thought like a man" for years, but his coworkers continued to gender him as female (Shaver 1995, 2).

2. (sociology) To perceive (a thing) as having characteristics associated with a certain gender, or as having been authored by someone of a certain gender.
   • 1996, Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, page 191:

     At the same time, however, the convictions they held about how a woman or man might write led them to interpret their findings in a rather androcentric fashion, and to gender the text accordingly.

   • 1997, Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, page 120:

     Like every Western culture preceding it, Renaissance society was gendered to the advantage of the adult male, who served as the template for all of humankind, women and children having been misstamped for other uses.

   • 2003, “Reading the Anonymous Female Voice”, in The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England, page 244:

     Yet because texts by “female authors” are not dependent on the voice to gender the text, the topics that they address and the traditions that they employ seem broader and somewhat less constrained by gender stereotypes.

   • 2019 May 22, Megan Specia, “Siri and Alexa Reinforce Gender Bias, U.N. Finds”, in New York Times‎^[4]:

     “Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” Saniye Gulser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said in a statement. “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether A.I. technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

Related terms

• misgender
• ungender, degender
• regender

Translations

Adjective

gender (comparative more gender, superlative most gender)

1. (LGBT, Internet slang, humorous) Evoking indescribable feelings regarding gender.

   This song is so gender.

Etymology 2

From Middle English gendren, genderen, from Middle French gendrer, from Latin generāre.

Verb

gender (third-person singular simple present genders, present participle gendering, simple past and past participle gendered)

1. (archaic) To engender.
   • 1854, Robert Gordon (D.D., Minister of the Free High Church, Edinburgh.), Christ as Made Known to the Ancient Church: an Exposition of the Revelation of Divine Grace, as Unfolded in the Old Testament Scriptures, page 400:

     […] being a stranger to those restrictions which were afterwards laid on his posterity by the Mosaic law, and which gendered a servile frame of spirit.

   • 1893, The Academy and Literature, page 71:

     Our whole life was passed in public, which gendered a sympathy and good fellowship that always distinguishes Wykehamists from the rest of mankind.

2. (archaic or obsolete) To breed.
   • Leviticus 19:19 (KJV):

     Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.

   • 1896, John Todhunter, Three Irish Bardic Tales: Being Metrical Versions of the Three Tales Known as the Three Sorrows of Story-telling, page 11:

     Fear in the witch's heart was gendering with her hate,
     Seeing her evil thought grown to an evil deed, […]

Translations

Etymology 3

Borrowed from Indonesian gender, from Javanese ꦒꦼꦤ꧀ꦢꦺꦂ (gendèr), from Old Javanese gĕnder.

Alternative forms

• gendèr

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɡənˈdɛː(r)/

Noun

gender (plural genders)

1. An Indonesian musical instrument resembling a xylophone, used in gamelan music.

Further reading

• gender in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• “gender”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “gender”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• “gender, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “gender”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “gender”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “gender” in TheFreeDictionary.com, Huntingdon Valley, Pa.: Farlex, Inc., 2003–2023.

Anagrams

• gerned

Dutch gender definition

Etymology

Borrowed from English gender.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɣɛn.dər/, /ˈdʒɛn.dər/

• Audio

  (file)

• Hyphenation: gen‧der

Noun

gender m or n (plural genders)

1. gender (mental analog of sex)

Usage notes

Dutch lacks words to distinguish gender from sex, using the words geslacht or sekse to encompass both concepts. The term gender in Dutch has been recently introduced for cases when a clear distinction is needed, such as in the distinction between transgender (feeling oneself to be different from one's birth sex) and transsexual (having or desiring the sexual organs of the sex opposite to those one had at birth).

Related terms

• genderdysforie
• transgender

German gender definition

Pronunciation

• Audio

  (file)

Verb

gender

1. inflection of gendern:
   1. first-person singular present
   2. singular imperative

Indonesian gender definition

Etymology 1

Internationalism, unadapted borrowing from English gender, from Middle English gendre, gender (see also gendres), from Middle French gendre, genre, from Latin genus (“kind, sort”). Doublet of genus, genre, and jenis.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡɛndər/
• Rhymes: -dər, -ər, -r
• Hyphenation: gèn‧dêr

Noun

gèndêr (plural gender-gender, first-person possessive genderku, second-person possessive gendermu, third-person possessive gendernya)

1. gender:
   1. sex (a category, either male or female, into which sexually-reproducing organisms are divided on the basis of their reproductive roles in their species).

      Synonyms: jantina, jenis kelamin, kelamin, seks

   2. Identification as a man, a woman, or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc; a category to which a person belongs on this basis.

Etymology 2

Borrowed from Javanese ꦒꦼꦤ꧀ꦢꦺꦂ (gendèr), from Old Javanese gĕnder.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɡənˈdɛr/
• Rhymes: -dɛr, -ɛr, -r
• Hyphenation: gên‧dèr

Noun

gêndèr (plural gender-gender, first-person possessive genderku, second-person possessive gendermu, third-person possessive gendernya)

1. (music) An Javanese gamelan instrument.

Further reading

• “gender” in Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, Jakarta: Language Development and Fostering Agency — Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology of the Republic Indonesia, 2016.

Polish gender definition

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from English gender.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈd͡ʐɛn.dɛr/

• Audio

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛndɛr
• Syllabification: gen‧der

Adjective

gender (not comparable)

1. (humanities, relational) genderism

   Synonym: genderowy

Noun

gender m inan (indeclinable)

1. gender (identification as a man, a woman, or something else)
2. (humanities) gender studies, genderism

   Synonyms: gender studies, genderyzm

Declension

Indeclinable

or

Derived terms

Related terms

Further reading

• gender in Wielki słownik języka polskiego, Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN
• gender in Polish dictionaries at PWN