English
gender
Pronunciation
  • (RP) IPA: /ˈdʒɛndə/
  • (America) IPA: /ˈdʒɛndɚ/
Noun

gender

  1. 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.]
  2. (now, 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 […] .
    • 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, […] .
  3. (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.]
    • 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 […]
    • 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.
    • 2015, Anna Giacalone Ramat, ‎Paolo Ramat, The Indo-European Languages ISBN 1134921861, page 191:
      The common gender might well reflect an IE animate gender.
  4. (grammar) Synonym of voice#English|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.
  5. (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).
  6. (obsolete) Class; kind. [14th-19th c.]
    • circa 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...
Synonyms
  • (grammar, of verbs) voice
  • (biological sex) sex
  • (class or kind) genre
Translations Translations Translations Translations Verb

gender (genders, present participle gendering; past and past participle gendered)

  1. (sociology) To assign a gender#Noun|gender to (a person); to perceive as having a gender; to address using terms (pronouns, nouns, adjectives...) that express a certain gender.
  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.
    • 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 Verb

gender (genders, present participle gendering; 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.


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