gender
noun
Simple meaning
How someone identifies as male, female, or another role
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
jehnderSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈdʒɛndɚ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Identification as a man, a woman, or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc; a category to which a person belongs on this basis.
now sometimes proscribed
Sex (a category, either male or female, into which sexually-reproducing organisms are divided on the basis of their reproductive roles in their species).
grammar
A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech) into masculine or feminine, and sometimes other categories like neuter or common, and animate or inanimate.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A1 · Beginner (estimated)
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Varies by meaning
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Identification as a man, a woman, or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc; a category to which a person belongs on this basis.
Used this way, gender is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Identification / sex
Other combinations
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Agreement in grammatical gender between words in the same construction.
Your identity as it is experienced with regard to your individuality as male or female.
The overt expression of attitudes that indicate to others the degree of your maleness or femaleness.
A grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: identification as a man or a woman
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.