Gendered

How to spell gendered

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce gendered

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gendered mean?

1. adjectiveReflecting, assuming, or differentiating between the social categories of male and female.

Gendered in a sentence

• The report criticised the company for its deeply gendered pay structure.

• Toy shops still tend to use gendered aisles for boys and girls.

Where does gendered come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows out of gender, which English took in the 1300s from the Old French gendre, meaning a kind or a class of things. That French form descended from the Latin genus, which literally meant 'birth', 'race', or 'kind', and which is also the ancestor of words such as genus, genre, and generate. For centuries gender simply meant a category or sort, and only later did it settle into its grammatical sense (the masculine and feminine classes of nouns) and then its modern social sense relating to men and women. The adjective gendered is comparatively recent, rising in academic and everyday use through the late twentieth century to describe things that are shaped by or divided along lines of gender. The spelling keeps the soft g of its French parent and the silent middle 'd' of gender, so writers must remember it is gen-der-ed rather than the phonetic 'jenderd'.

How the word is built

• gender (kind, sort, sex category; from Latin genus)
• -ed (adjective-forming suffix)