Female

How to spell female

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce female

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does female mean?

1. adjectiveOf or relating to the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs.
2. nounA person or animal of the sex that can bear young or produce eggs.

Female in a sentence

• adjective

  The clinic reported a higher female attendance this year.

• noun

  Each female in the herd was tagged and recorded by the vet.

• adjective

  The survey separated responses by female and male participants.

• noun

  The census counted every female over the age of eighteen.

Where does female come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word came from the Latin femella, a diminutive of femina meaning 'woman', so it literally meant something like 'little woman' or 'young woman'. It travelled into English through the Old French femelle during the 1300s, when its original form looked nothing like 'male'. The modern spelling is the result of a folk reshaping: English speakers altered femelle to 'female' by analogy with 'male', wrongly assuming the two words were a matched pair. In fact 'male' descends from a completely separate Latin root, masculus, so the visual resemblance is a historical accident rather than a true family link. That tidy but misleading pairing is exactly why the ending settled on -male, and it helps to remember that 'female' simply contains the word 'male' spelled out in full.

How the word is built

• fem- (from Latin femina: woman)
• -ale (from the diminutive ending, later reshaped to match 'male')