gender
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈd͡ʒɛndə/
ipa: /ˈd͡ʒɛndɚ/
rhymes: -ɛndə(ɹ)
Forms: form: genders
form: g.
Etymology: From Middle English gendre, borrowed from Old French gendre, borrowed from Latin genere (“type, kind”). Doublet of genre and genus. The verb developed after the noun.
Senses: examples: text: […]plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many[…]
ref: 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]:
glosses: Class; kind.
examples: text: the gene is activated in both genders
text: The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, gender, and other factors.
text: 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 […] .
ref: 1723, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter, 7 December
text: 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.
ref: 1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC:
text: Gender does not necessarily have primacy in this respect. Economic class and ethnic differentiation can also be important relational hierarchies, […].
ref: 2004, Wenona Mary Giles, Jennifer Hyndman, Sites of violence: gender and conflict zones, page 28:
text: 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.
ref: 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Asari: Biology Codex entry:
glosses: Sex (a category, either male or female, into which sexually-reproducing organisms are divided on the basis of their reproductive roles in their species).
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1979 January 8, Merissa Sherrill Lynn, “Statement”, in Newsletter, number 7, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1:
text: 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.
ref: 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, Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 439:
text: 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.
ref: 1998, Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle, University of California Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 23:
text: 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, […]
ref: 2007, Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, →ISBN, page 93:
text: 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.
ref: 2010, Eve Shapiro, Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age, →ISBN:
text: 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.
ref: 2012, Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories, page 5:
text: The State Department and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio are expressly directed under the injunction to “to process and issue passports [...] consistent with the State Department’s policy as of January 19, 2025,” and to allow passport applicants to self-declare their gender even if that information is “different from the sex assigned to those individuals under the [Trump] Passport Policy.”
ref: 2025 June 18, Samantha Riedel, “In Trans Legal Victory, Federal Judge Blocks Trump Admin From Denying Passport Gender Changes”, in Them:
glosses: 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.)
examples: text: The pronominal declension [of English], on which we will focus most of our attention, inflects pronouns for person, number, case, gender, animacy, and reflexivity.
ref: 1990, Edwin L. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language, →ISBN, page 73:
text: In Algonquian languages, given the full morphology of a noun, one can predict whether it belongs to the animate or inanimate gender […]
ref: 1991, Greville G. Corbett, Gender, →ISBN, pages 22 and 65:
text: 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.
ref: 2006, Viktor Elšik, Yaron Matras, Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample, →ISBN, page 29:
text: The common gender might well reflect an IE animate gender.
ref: 2015, Anna Giacalone Ramat, Paolo Ramat, The Indo-European Languages, →ISBN, page 191:
topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: 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.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 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:
text: 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.
ref: 1866, Guðbrandr Vigfusson, “Some remarks upon the Use of the Reflexive Pronoun in Icelandic”, in Transactions of the Philological Society, page 87:
text: The general distinction is between three 'genders' out of the five genders of the Latin tradition: active gender, passive gender, neuter gender.
ref: 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:
topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: Synonym of voice (“particular way of inflecting or conjugating verbs”).
synonyms: word: voice
extra: particular way of inflecting or conjugating verbs
examples: text: Connectors are identified by gender. When copper pins are exposed in the connector, its gender is male.
ref: 2015, Ron Carswell, Shen Jiang, Mary Ellen Hardee, Guide to Parallel Operating Systems with Windows 10 and Linux, page 10:
qualifier: hardware
glosses: The quality which distinguishes connectors, which may be male (fitting into another connector) and female (having another connector fit into it), or genderless or androgynous (capable of fitting together with another connector of the same type).
glosses: Sex, sexual intercourse.
Synonyms: sense: class or kind
word: genre
topics: sex
sexuality
lifestyle
word: biological sex
word: gendersex
topics: grammar
linguistics
human-sciences
sciences
sense: of verbs
word: voice
Derived terms: agender
all-gender
ambigender
anti-gender
antigender
antigenderism
antigenderist
autigender
bigender
biogender
catgender
cisgender
cis-gender
cogender
common gender
crossgender
demigender
fourth gender
genderable
gender-affected
gender affirmation surgery
gender-affirming
gender-affirming surgery
genderal
gender asterisk
gender baiting
gender-baiting
gender-balanced
genderbend
gender-bender
gender bender
genderbending
gender binary
gender-binary
gender-blind
gender blind
genderbread person
gender budgeting
gender card
gender changer
gendercide
gender cleavage
gender confirmation surgery
gender continuum
gender-critical feminism
gender-critical feminist
gender critical
gender-critical
gender diverse
gender dysphoria
gender-dysphoric
gendered
gender envy
genderer
gender euphoria
gender-expansive
gender expression
genderfae
gender-flip
genderfluid
gender-fluid
gender fluidity
genderflux
gender-free
genderfuck
gender gap
gender hoard
genderic
gender identity
gender identity disorder
GID
gender identity syndrome
gender ideology
gender-inclusive
gender inclusivity
gender incongruence
genderisation
genderism
genderist
genderization
genderize
genderland
genderlect
genderless
genderlike
genderly
gender mainstreaming
gender mender
gender minority
gender neutral
gender-neutral
gender neutrality
gender-neutrality
gender-neutralize
gender-neutrally
gender nonconforming
gender-nonconforming
gender non-conforming
gender nonconformity
genderology
gender panembung
genderphobia
genderplay
gender presentation
genderpunk
genderquake
genderqueer
GQ
gender realignment surgery
gender reallocation surgery
gender reassignment
gender reassignment surgery
gender recognition
gender recognition certificate
gender reveal
gender role
gender-role
gender-safe
genderscape
gendersex
genderspeak
genderspecial
gender-specific
gender-specifically
gender spectrum
gender star
gender studies
genderswap
gender swap
genderswapping
gender-swapping
gender swaps
gender theory
gender transition
gendertrash
gender-vague
gender vague
gendervague
gender-variant
genderwise
gendie
grammatical gender
heterogender
homogender
hypergender
intergender
intragender
ipso gender
legal gender
like-gendered
metagender
meta-gender
monogender
multigender
natural gender
neurogender
neuter gender
nongender
omnigender
pangender
pan-gender
play the gender card
polygender
postgender
pregender
psychogender
rapid onset gender dysphoria
rapid-onset gender dysphoria
same-gender-loving
same gender loving
same-gender marriage
same gender
same-gender
sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts
subgender
third gender
transgender
TG
transgendercide
trans someone's gender
trigender
xenogender
xgender
Related terms: topics: sex
sexuality
lifestyle
word: female
word: male
word: hermaphroditic
word: man
word: woman
word: hermaphrodite
sense: identification
word: genderqueer
word: bigender
word: non-binary
word: transgender
word: androgyne
word: crossdresser
word: hijra
word: kathoey
word: transsexual
word: two-spirit
topics: grammar
linguistics
human-sciences
sciences
word: common
word: feminine
word: masculine
word: neuter