Feminine

How to spell feminine

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce feminine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does feminine mean?

1. adjectiveHaving qualities or characteristics traditionally associated with women.
2. adjectiveBelonging to the grammatical gender that, in many languages, includes most words for female beings.

Feminine in a sentence

• The boutique stocked soft, feminine fabrics in pale colours.

• In French the word for table is grammatically feminine.

• She chose a feminine script for the wedding invitations.

• Students learn which nouns take the feminine article in Spanish.

Where does feminine come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin femininus, meaning 'of a woman' or 'womanly', which was built on the noun femina, the everyday Latin word for 'woman'. English took it in during the 1300s by way of Old French feminin, where it was used both in ordinary description and as a grammatical term for one of the genders of nouns. The underlying femina ultimately traces back to a root meaning 'to suckle' or 'one who nurses', the same ancient source that gave Latin its words for breastfeeding. That deep root also surfaces in the relatives 'female' and 'feminist', so the whole family circles back to femina. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle and end: it is fem-i-nine, with three short i-sounds all written with the letter i, and writers must resist swapping in an e or dropping the final e.

How the word is built

• femin- (from Latin femina: woman)
• -ine (adjective suffix meaning 'of or relating to')