Sentence:  Due to their lexical gender-neutrality, feminine <WSD>epicenes</WSD> can easily be used to refer to both sexes despite their fixed feminine grammatical gender. [...] Compared to the cases of feminine male personal nouns mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, feminine <WSD>epicenes</WSD> are generally less pejorative in meaning. Many MF languages of the Indo-European family, for example, possess a feminine noun denoting 'person': e.g. Catalan/Italian/Spanish "persona", French "personne", Portuguese "pessoa", Romanian "pesoană", German "Person", Icelandic "persóna", Czech/Polish/Serbian "osoba", Slovenian "oseba". 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  An epicene word; "preceded by" '''(the)''': the epicene words of a language as a class.