English

Noun

gender ‎(plural genders)

1. Grammatical gender.
   1. (grammar) A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech) into masculine and feminine, and sometimes other categories like neuter or common. [from 14th c.]
      • 1990, Edwin L. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language (ISBN 0791403696), 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.

      • 2006, Viktor Elšik, ‎Yaron Matras, Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample (ISBN 3110197596), 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.

   2. (grammar) Any division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech), such as masculine / feminine / neuter, or animate / inanimate. [from 19th c.]
      • 1991, Greville G. Corbett, Gender (ISBN 052133845X), pages 22 and 65:

        To understand this title one needs to know that, in his brief description of gender in Algonquian, Bloomfield (1946:94) listed various exceptional animates including 'raspberry' but not 'strawberry'.

        […]

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

      • 2015, Anna Giacalone Ramat, ‎Paolo Ramat, The Indo-European Languages (ISBN 1134921861), page 191:

        The common gender might well reflect an IE animate gender.

   3. (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 (eds.), 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.

2. (obsolete) Class; kind. [14th-19th c.]
   • c. 1603, William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3:

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

3. (informal, sometimes proscribed) Sex (a category such as "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 […] .

4. Identification as male/masculine, female/feminine, 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.]
   • 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, […] .

   • 2007, Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband (ISBN 0786750545), 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 113499950X):

     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.

5. (electronics) The fact of being male or female (as a connector). [from 20th c.]

Usage notes

Since the 1960s, it is increasingly common—particularly in academic contexts—to distinguish between sex and gender, the former being taken as inherent biological distinctions and the latter as constructed social and cultural ones. See Wikipedia's article on the Sex and gender distinction.

Synonyms

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

Derived terms

Translations

See also

• (grammar) feminine, masculine, neuter
• (sex) female, male, hermaphroditic/hermaphrodite; man, woman, hermaphrodite
• (mental analogue of sex; socio-cultural phenomenon) androgyne, crossdresser, hijra, kathoey, two-spirit, transsexual

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.

   • 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.

Related terms

• misgender
• ungender, degender
• regender

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.
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.

Translations

Dutch

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɣɛn.dər/, /ˈdʒɛn.dər/

Etymology

From English gender.

Noun

gender c ‎(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