GENDER • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Gender

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/dʒˈɛndər/ Listen

noun

Gender n.

Kind; sort. (Obs.) "One gender of herbs."

Sex, male or female. Note: The use of the term gender to refer to the sex of an animal, especially a person, was once common, then fell into disuse as the term became used primarily for the distinction of grammatical declension forms in inflected words. In the late 1900's, the term again became used to refer to the sex of people, as a euphemism for the term sex, especially in discussions of laws and policies on equal treatment of sexes. Objections by prescriptivists that the term should be used only in a grammatical context ignored the earlier uses.

(Gram.) A classification of nouns, primarily according to sex; and secondarily according to some fancied or imputed quality associated with sex. "Gender is a grammatical distinction and applies to words only. Sex is natural distinction and applies to living objects." Note: Adjectives and pronouns are said to vary in gender when the form is varied according to the gender of the words to which they refer.

verb

Gender v. t. (past & past part. gendered; pres. part. gendering) To beget; to engender.

Gender v. i. To copulate; to breed. (R.)

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Etymology of 'Gender'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Gender" Quotes from Famous Books

... to their ships, choosing, whenever possible, appropriate ones; while the less courteous Romans bestowed masculine names on theirs. Though we may not have followed the Greek rule, we to the present day always look upon a ship as of the feminine gender. ...

— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... amusing and provocative of much merriment. Here is one. The writer is one "Bill Pumpkin," H.M.S. "Ugly Mug," who states that the holder, Mary Brown (who does not know Mary the ubiquitous Mary), "has a strange knack of forgetting the gender of a shirt, for it not unfrequently happens that you may find her with that article of male apparel on her own 'proper person,' otherwise, he says, she is all that can be desired." The said Mary B being unable to read English—or for ...

— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... affectation, which is simply and without exaggeration what the stage commonly gives us for a fine lady; an old woman in her hands was a thorough woman, thoroughly old, not a cackling young person of epicene gender. She played Sir Harry Wildair like a man, which is how he ought to be played (or, which is better still, not at all), so that Garrick acknowledged her as a male rival, and abandoned the ...

— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... admirable old glass. I spent half an hour there one morning, listening to what the church had to say, in perfect solitude. Not a worshipper entered, not even an old man with a broom. I have always thought there be a sex in fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of the gender of the name ...

— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... more abstract principles, such as the formation of the compound tenses, the formation and the use of the passive voice, and so on. But attempts at inductive teaching of concrete elements of mechanical memory, such as the gender and plural of nouns, or the principal parts of strong verbs, are a misunderstanding of the principles of induction. It goes without saying that thorough drill is much more valuable than the most explicit explanation. It ...

— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

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