- For other uses, see Gender (disambiguation).
Gender, for the purposes of this article, is the perceived or identified masculinity or femininity of a person or characteristic. A
person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors. This
aggregate gender is often not easily categorized simply, although society tends to assume a simple binary categorization. Gender
meanings are constantly being renegotiated, as, for example, the color pink, considered masculine in the early 1900s, is now seen
as feminine, and vice versa for blue. Gender is also evolving in this usage from noun to adjective: it is increasingly being seen
as an attribute (like color) rather than as a distinct entity in itself.
The English noun "gender"
is derived from the Old French word genre, meaning "kind of thing". It goes back to the Latin word
genus (meaning "kind", "species").
Gender is often, and incorrectly, used as a synonym for sex, referring to the
physical characteristics commonly used to differentiate male from female. This has given rise to the use of "gender" in the
engineering field, to denote polarity of mating connectors that have "male" plugs and "female" sockets. For an
example in this context see gender changer.
Unlike most East Asian, African, or Native American languages, in the grammar of
Indo-European languages - e.g., Sanskrit; Greek; Latin and its successors, the Romance languages; and the Slavic and Germanic Languages - nouns and pronouns have a
grammatical gender. This is the original use of the term, and
dismay can still be found concerning the term's replacement of sex.
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