grammatical gender

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.”

Word History and Origins

Origin of grammatical gender¹

First recorded in 1870–75

Example Sentences

Shouldn’t everyone, they ask, be equally subject to the laws of grammatical gender?

Read more on New York Times

One reason is connected to Hanna et al.’s observation that, without grammatical gender, people can still gender themselves.

Read more on Scientific American

Linguistic variations in syntax, formality and grammatical gender pose their own problems.

Read more on The Guardian

“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.

Read more on New York Times

Critics were quick to point out that grammatical gender is very different for biological sex.

Read more on BBC

When To Use

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.)