Gender

How to spell gender

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce gender

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gender mean?

1. nounThe classification of a person as male or female, or the social and personal identity associated with that.
2. nounA grammatical category (such as masculine, feminine, or neuter) into which nouns are divided in some languages.

Gender in a sentence

• The form asked applicants to state their age and gender.

• In French, every noun has a grammatical gender that affects the article.

• The survey results were broken down by gender and income.

• Learners of German must memorise the gender of each new noun.

Where does gender come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin genus, with the stem gener-, meaning 'kind', 'sort', 'race', or 'birth'. It reached English in the 1300s through the Old French gendre (modern French genre), and at first it simply meant a class, kind, or type of thing. Grammarians soon borrowed it for the categories (masculine, feminine, neuter) into which nouns were sorted in languages like Latin and French, and from there it broadened to the classification of people as male or female. The same Latin root sits inside a whole family of relatives, including 'genus', 'genre', 'generate', and 'general', all carrying the underlying idea of a kind or origin. The 'd' in the English spelling is a French addition that crept in between the 'n' and the 'r' of gendre, which is why we write gender rather than the more Latin-looking 'gener'.

How the word is built

• gen- (from Latin genus: kind, sort, birth)
• -der (noun ending, via Old French gendre)