gender

/ˈdʒɛndər/

/ˈdʒɛndə/

Other forms: genders

People use the word gender to indicate your biological sex or your sense of being female, male, or a combination of both. Danica Patrick is someone who has broken many gender barriers by being a successful female race-car driver in a male-dominated sport.

If you've learned French, Spanish, or Latin, you know these languages assign genders to nouns, such as masculine, feminine, or neuter. Besides this grammatical use, gender and sex are very often used as synonyms in everyday speech. However, while sex refers to biological differences between men and women, gender is much more complicated and changeable, influenced by society, culture, and an individual person's self-identity.

Definitions of gender

1. noun

   the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles
   synonyms: sex, sexuality

   types:

   maleness, masculinity

   the properties characteristic of the male sex

   androgyny, bisexuality, hermaphroditism

   showing characteristics of both sexes

   femaleness, feminineness

   the properties characteristic of the female sex

   virility

   the masculine property of being capable of copulation and procreation

   type of:

   physiological property

   a property having to do with the functioning of the body
2. noun

   the set of cultural and behavioral traits commonly associated with one sex
3. noun

   members of one gender considered as a group
   type of:

   group, grouping

   any number of entities (members) considered as a unit
4. noun

   your identity as it is experienced with regard to your individuality as male or female, both male and female, or neither; awareness normally begin in infancy and is reinforced during adolescence
   synonyms: gender identity

   type of:

   identity, individuality, personal identity, selfhood

   the distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity
5. noun

   a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness
   synonyms: grammatical gender

   types:

   feminine

   a gender that refers chiefly (but not exclusively) to females or to objects classified as female

   masculine

   a gender that refers chiefly (but not exclusively) to males or to objects classified as male

   neuter

   a gender that refers chiefly (but not exclusively) to inanimate objects (neither masculine nor feminine)

   type of:

   grammatical category, syntactic category

   (grammar) a category of words having the same grammatical properties