grammatical gender

American  

noun

Grammar.

1. gender based on arbitrary assignment, without regard to the referent of a noun, as in French le livre (masculine), “the book,” and German das Mädchen (neuter), “the girl.”

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Usage

What is grammatical gender? Grammatical gender is a way of classifying nouns that unpredictably assigns them gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. For example, in French, the grammatical gender of la maison (“the house”) is classified as feminine, while le livre (“the book”) is classified as masculine. Grammatical gender is not used in English. Grammatical in this phrase means relating to grammar, which is basically the rules of how to construct sentences in a language. The word gender here is not really related to the way that humans identify themselves in real life. In many languages, the grammatical gender of a word affects how other words can be used with it in a sentence. The three most commonly used grammatical gender categories are masculine, feminine, and neuter, but each language differs. Grammatical gender is contrasted with natural gender or naturalistic gender, in which nouns are classified in ways that align with their real-world qualities. Girl and boy are examples of nouns with naturalistic gender. (In English, this matters because those words can be replaced with gendered pronouns like she and he.)

Etymology

Origin of grammatical gender

First recorded in 1870–75

Example Sentences

One of the reasons Yautja has no grammatical gender is because that was most practical.

From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 10, 2025

I work at an afterschool program in a country where the native language has very strict rules for grammatical gender.

From Slate • Feb. 3, 2020

The differences between grammatical gender systems in natural languages provide a fruitful basis for empirical research.

From Scientific American • May 29, 2019

“She didn’t think that grammatical gender would change the way people thought. Then we started talking about the word ‘giraffe,’ which is masculine in my native Russian but feminine in German.

From New York Times • Mar. 14, 2019

Natural sex of course remains, being inherent in all language; but grammatical gender, with the exception of ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’, and perhaps one or two other fragmentary instances, the language has altogether forgone.

From English Past and Present by Palmer, Abram Smythe