gender

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Grammar A grammatical category used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms.
2. n. Grammar One category of such a set.
3. n. Grammar The classification of a word or grammatical form in such a category.
4. n. Grammar The distinguishing form or forms used.
5. n. Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.
6. n. The condition of being female or male; sex.
7. n. Females or males considered as a group: expressions used by one gender.
8. v. To engender.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. Kind; sort; class; genus.
2. n. Sex, male or female.
3. n. In grammar, a formal distinction in words, apparently founded on and in part expressing differences of sexual character, as male and female, or as male, female, or of neither sex (neuter). In the languages of the Indo-European family the distinction originally is threefold, as masculine, feminine, and neuter (the first including principally male beings, the second female, and the third those of no sex), and appears in nouns, adjectives, and pronouns (except the personal pronouns), although among masculines and feminines are included (on grounds not yet made clear) many words designating things of no sex. In the Semitic languages the genders are only two, masculine and feminine, and the distinction is made also in the second and third persons of verbs. In the majority of languages distinction of gender is altogether wanting. In some tongues differences not of sex are made the ground of formal distinctions also called by some by the name gender: thus, that of animate and inanimate objects in American languages; a manifold distinction (of obscure origin) in South African languages, and so on. Some languages, like the modern French, have lost the neuter gender, and have masculine and feminine only; some, like English, have no gender except in a few pronouns, as he, she, it; some, like modern Persian, have no gender whatever.
4. To beget; procreate; generate; engender.
5. Hence To give rise to; bring out or forth.
6. To copulate; breed.
7. n. A Javanese musical instrument of the xylophone class. It consists of a graduated series of eleven strips of metal strung together by two cords tied about them at their nodal points, and each provided beneath with a piece of bamboo for a resonator.

Wiktionary

1. n. grammar A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech), such as masculine, feminine, neuter or common.
2. n. The biological sex of an individual (usually male or female).
3. n. The mental analogue of sex: one's maleness (masculinity) or femaleness (femininity). (Also called gender identity.)
4. n. The socio-cultural phenomenon of the division of people into various categories such as "male" and "female", with each having associated clothing, roles, stereotypes, etc.
5. n. obsolete A division between classes or kinds.
6. v. sociology, of a person To assign (someone else) a gender; to perceive (someone else) as having a gender.
7. v. archaic To engender.
8. v. archaic or obsolete To breed.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. obsolete Kind; sort.
2. n. Sex, male or female.
3. n. (Gram.) A classification of nouns, primarily according to sex; and secondarily according to some fancied or imputed quality associated with sex.
4. v. To beget; to engender.
5. v. rare To copulate; to breed.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness
2. n. the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles