gender

Etymology 1

From Middle English gendre, gender (see also gendres), from Middle French gendre, genre, from Latin genus (“kind, sort”). Doublet of genre, genus, and kin. The verb developed after the noun.

noun

1. (obsolete) Class; kind.
2. (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.
   The pronominal declension [of English], on which we will focus most of our attention, inflects pronouns for person, number, case, gender, animacy, and reflexivity. 1990, Edwin L. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language, page 73
   In Algonquian languages, given the full morphology of a noun, one can predict whether it belongs to the animate or inanimate gender […] 1991, Greville G. Corbett, Gender, pages 22 and 65
   Pronouns, for instance, are structures that organise information about continuous referents. This information is typically categorised in Romani according to Person, Number, Gender, Animacy, Case, and Discreteness. 2006, Viktor Elšik, Yaron Matras, Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample, page 29
   The common gender might well reflect an IE animate gender. 2015, Anna Giacalone Ramat, Paolo Ramat, The Indo-European Languages, page 191
3. (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).
   the gene is activated in both genders
   The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, gender, and other factors.
   To say truth, I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex; and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them […] . 1723, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter, 7 December
   Gender does not necessarily have primacy in this respect. Economic class and ethnic differentiation can also be important relational hierarchies, […]. 2004, Wenona Mary Giles, Jennifer Hyndman, Sites of violence: gender and conflict zones, page 28
   Although asari have one gender, they are not asexual. An asari provides two copies of her own genes to her offspring. The second set is altered in a unique process called melding. During melding, an asari consciously attunes her nervous system to her partner's, sending and receiving electrical impulses directly through the skin. The partner can be another asari, or an alien of either gender. Effectively, the asari and her partner briefly become one unified nervous system. 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Asari: Biology Codex entry
4. 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. (Compare gender role, gender identity.)
   I am a cross-dresser by pleasure and inclination, a transgenderal person. To me for human beings to express themselves along gender lines is a wonderful and uniquely human phenomena. 1/8/1979, Merissa Sherrill Lynn, “Statement”, in Newsletter, number 7, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1
   Gender is the sociocultural designation of biobehavioral and psychosocial qualities of the sexes; for example, woman (female), man (male), other(s) (e.g., berdaches²). Notions of gender are culturally specific and depend on the ways in which cultures define and differentiate human (and other) potentials and possibilities. While many people in Western society may think first of heterosexual women and men when the word "gender" is mentioned, there are more gender possibilities than just those two. 1989, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Christine Roberts, “Sex, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Variance”, in Sandra Morgen, editor, Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 439
   From simply "adding women" into the analysis of work and seeing "gender" as another word for "sex," we have moved to the understanding that gender is a social process and a social construction of sexual differences. It is as much an independent variable as a dependent variable, shaped by social and historical processes. Beyond bringing women back into analyses of the workplace and the labor process, we now have to analyze how work is gendered and gendering: gender as a means of control and an organizing principle for class relations at the point of production, and workplace as a site for gender construction, formation, and reproduction. In the latest development, seeing gender as a power process also directs our attention toward the politics of identity, or the formation and claiming of collective subjectivities. 1998, Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle, University of California Press, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 23
   One wife I met at a conference was in a hurry for her husband to have the genital surgery because she worried about his gender and genitals not matching if he were in a car accident, […] 2007, Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, page 93
   Thomas Beatie, a transgendered man, announced in an April 2008 issue of the gay and lesbian news magazine, The Advocate, that he was pregnant. […] Moreover, he saw no conflict between his gender and his pregnancy. 2010, Eve Shapiro, Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age
   Intersex people too challenge the idea that physical sex, not merely gender, is binary – a person must be definitively either one sex or the other. 2012, Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories, page 5
5. (grammar) Synonym of voice (“particular way of inflecting or conjugating verbs”)
   143. […] We have now to speak of the following eight particulars relating to verbs: Gender or Sort, Person, Number, Time, Mode, Participle, Gerund, and Supine. … 1st.--Of the Gender. 144. Gender means the same as sort or kind. There are four principal Sorts of Verbs; namely, Active verbs, Passive verbs, Neuter verbs, and Impersonal verbs. 1835, James Paul Cobbett, A Latin Grammar for the Use of English Boys: Being an Explanation of the Rudiments of the Latin Language, London, page 111
   Many of the words quoted are purely reflexive, others passive or deponent. Such words as óttask, œðrask, dásk, iðrask, reiðask are deponent, though they originally may have been reflexive, but the active gender is here quite obsolete. 1866, Guðbrandr Vigfusson, “Some remarks upon the Use of the Reflexive Pronoun in Icelandic”, in Transactions of the Philological Society, page 87
   The general distinction is between three 'genders' out of the five genders of the Latin tradition: active gender, passive gender, neuter gender. 2007, Bernard Colombat, “Some Problems in Transferring the Latin Model to the First French Grammars: Verbal voice, impersonal verbs and the -rais form”, in Eduardo Guimarães, Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros, editors, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 110: History of Linguistics 2002, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 6
6. (hardware) The quality which distinguishes connectors, which may be male (fitting into another connector) and female (having another connector fit into it), or genderless/androgynous (capable of fitting together with another connector of the same type).
   Connectors are identified by gender. When copper pins are exposed in the connector, its gender is male. 2015, Ron Carswell, Shen Jiang, Mary Ellen Hardee, Guide to Parallel Operating Systems with Windows 10 and Linux, page 10

verb

1. (sociology) To assign a gender to (a person); to perceive as having a gender; to address using terms (pronouns, nouns, adjectives...) that express a certain gender.
   In an interview, he even noted that he "dressed, acted and thought like a man" for years, but his coworkers continued to gender him as female (Shaver 1995, 2). 2011, Kristen Schilt, Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, page 147
2. (sociology) To perceive (a thing) as having characteristics associated with a certain gender, or as having been authored by someone of a certain gender.
   At the same time, however, the convictions they held about how a woman or man might write led them to interpret their findings in a rather androcentric fashion, and to gender the text accordingly. 1996, Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, page 191
   Like every Western culture preceding it, Renaissance society was gendered to the advantage of the adult male, who served as the template for all of humankind, women and children having been misstamped for other uses. 1997, Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, page 120
   Yet because texts by “female authors” are not dependent on the voice to gender the text, the topics that they address and the traditions that they employ seem broader and somewhat less constrained by gender stereotypes. 2003, “Reading the Anonymous Female Voice”, in The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England, page 244
   “Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” Saniye Gulser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said in a statement. “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether A.I. technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.” 2019-05-22, Megan Specia, “Siri and Alexa Reinforce Gender Bias, U.N. Finds”, in New York Times

adj

1. (LGBT, Internet slang, humorous) Evoking indescribable feelings regarding gender.
   This song is so gender.

Etymology 2

From Middle English gendren, genderen, from Middle French gendrer, from Latin generāre.

verb

1. (archaic) To engender.
   […] being a stranger to those restrictions which were afterwards laid on his posterity by the Mosaic law, and which gendered a servile frame of spirit. 1854, Robert Gordon (D.D., Minister of the Free High Church, Edinburgh.), Christ as Made Known to the Ancient Church: an Exposition of the Revelation of Divine Grace, as Unfolded in the Old Testament Scriptures, page 400
   Our whole life was passed in public, which gendered a sympathy and good fellowship that always distinguishes Wykehamists from the rest of mankind. 1893, The Academy and Literature, page 71
2. (archaic or obsolete) To breed.
   Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee. Leviticus 19:19 (KJV)
   Fear in the witch's heart was gendering with her hate, Seeing her evil thought grown to an evil deed, […] 1896, John Todhunter, Three Irish Bardic Tales: Being Metrical Versions of the Three Tales Known as the Three Sorrows of Story-telling, page 11

Etymology 3

Borrowed from Indonesian gender, from Javanese ꦒꦼꦤ꧀ꦢꦺꦂ (gendèr), from Old Javanese gĕnder.

noun

1. An Indonesian musical instrument resembling a xylophone, used in gamelan music.