Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A grammatical category, often designated as male, female, or neuter, 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.
  • noun The fact of being classified as belonging to such a category.
  • noun Either of the two divisions, designated female and male, by which most organisms are classified on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions; sex.
  • noun One's identity as female or male or as neither entirely female nor entirely male.
  • noun Females or males considered as a group.
  • transitive verb To engender.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Kind; sort; class; genus.
  • noun Sex, male or female.
  • noun 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).
  • noun A Javanese musical instrument of the xylophone class.
  • To beget; procreate; generate; engender.
  • Hence To give rise to; bring out or forth.
  • To copulate; breed.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb rare To copulate; to breed.
  • transitive verb To beget; to engender.
  • noun obsolete Kind; sort.
  • noun Sex, male or female.
  • noun (Gram.) A classification of nouns, primarily according to sex; and secondarily according to some fancied or imputed quality associated with sex.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun grammar A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech), such as masculine, feminine, neuter or common.
  • noun The biological sex of an individual (usually male or female).
  • noun The mental analogue of sex: one's maleness (masculinity) or femaleness (femininity). (Also called gender identity.)
  • noun 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.
  • noun obsolete A division between classes or kinds.
  • verb sociology, of a person To assign (someone else) a gender; to perceive (someone else) as having a gender.
  • verb archaic To engender.
  • verb archaic or obsolete To breed.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun 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
  • noun the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English gendre, from Old French, kind, gender, from Latin genus, gener-; see genə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English, from Middle French gendre/genre, from Latin genus ("kind, sort"). The verb developed after the noun.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English gendren, genderen, from Middle French gendrer, from Latin generāre.

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Examples

  • Some words, then, have a gender quite apart from sex or real gender, and this is called «grammatical gender».

    Latin for Beginners Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge 1900

  • UpdateCommand = "UPDATE [stock] SET [category] = @newcategory WHERE (([category] = @oldcategory) AND ([gender] = @gender))"

    ASP.NET Forums 2009

  • The participants were soon running roughshod over him, proving the term gender activist was a misnomer.

    Spellbound Karen Palmer 2010

  • The participants were soon running roughshod over him, proving the term gender activist was a misnomer.

    Spellbound Karen Palmer 2010

  • The participants were soon running roughshod over him, proving the term gender activist was a misnomer.

    Spellbound Karen Palmer 2010

  • Their first tack was the attempt to separate sex from gender, that is, the biological fact of the two human sexes from their social and cultural expressions, which they term gender, and which are seen as totally socially constructed and in no way grounded in nature.

    Liberalism's Three Assaults 2007

  • Abandoning the term "gender equality" takes something away from the internationally used terminology, and the replacement is more cumbersome and awkward, he said in the e-mail.

    The Globe and Mail - Home RSS feed GLORIA GALLOWAY 2011

  • Another food trend that comes dipped in gender is the so-called "cupcake revolution".

    The truth about men, women and food Eva Wiseman 2010

  • According to wikipedia.com; The word gender comes from the Middle English gendre, a loanword from Norman-conquest-era Middle French.

    Gender Sensitivity Among Nigerian Ethnic Group « Illiteracy Articles « Articles « Literacy News 2009

  • To place the term gender in the terms insures it will always be noticed, as opposed to just being two folks committed for life in a very special relationship where gender is no ones business but the couples.

    A couple of gender-neutral marriage related links 2005

  • Everything could have been deemed by taking one look at my body because society assumes that’s what we’re bred and born to do,” he said of the gender dysphoria — a psychology term to describe the emotional effects a person experiences when there’s a disconnect between their gender identity and biological sex — he endured throughout Acts 1 and 2.

    Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina's Lachlan Watson Talks Life Inside 'The Gender Void' MTV 2018

  • Recruitment information with a link to the survey was placed on three websites where parents and professionals had been observed to describe what seemed to be a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria (4thwavenow, transgender trend, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals), although the specific terminology “rapid onset gender dysphoria” did not appear on these websites until the recruitment information using that term was first posted on the sites.

    Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria Lisa Littman 2023

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