For example, queen, woman, girl, mother, hen, cow, vixen, etc. In other words, nouns that specify femininity are of feminine gender. Some sentences using feminine genders are:. It jumped over the wall. Some nouns are neither male nor female; they fall under the neuter gender. For example: table, hair, city, etc. These nouns are inanimate or non living entities and are assigned neither feminine nor a masculine gender.
If we look closely, English contains a lot of nouns which do not specify the gender of the noun. These nouns can stand for both male and female. For example, teacher, student, cousin, parent, etc. These types of nouns which can stand for both the genders- masculine and feminine- fall into the category of the Common Gender.
Some other examples of sentences using common gender are:. Nouns, apart from gender, also account for number in English. More shall be discussed on this in another article. Your Name required. Your Email required. It is always good to have a list of masculine and feminine nouns so that you can make out the difference in gender by just looking at the word itself.
If you know how feminine words are formed from masculine then it becomes a whole lot easier for you. A noun that denotes either a male or a female sex is called common gender. A noun that is used to denotes a non-living and lifeless things is called a neuter gender. It is a noun that denotes a thing that is neither male nor female. Let us now see some examples of neuter gender nouns :.
Women are far more likely than men to be described as gossiping. But some of those words become gendered anyway when choose different words to describe men and women. Feisty is a classic example. Academics from the University of Illinois and the University of California analyzed over , works of fiction written between and They identified words connecting to male or female characters and the actions they performed. The study showed that the word house used to be a strongly male term in the s.
House was associated with the landed gentry in Victorian era. But as the 20th century wore on, house became a slightly more female term associated with domesticity. The writer Ben Blatt found that the verbs most associated with the pronoun she in classic fiction are: shivered, wept, murmured, screamed, and married. In other words, the vocabulary used to describe women and men is becoming more blurred.
Nearly all words have different shades of meaning. While the speaker intends the positive one, the hearer often hears the negative. Lane, you are so articulate. Thanks to: The Economist. In English we do not assign a gender to words.
But how does gender work in foreign languages? For Italians, boys il bambino are masculine. Girls la bambina , on the other hand, are feminine.
Germans, for example, assign three different genders to the three basic eating utensils: fork die Gabel is feminine.
A knife das Messer is neutral. The list goes on. If you want to know more, check this short article. These include ships, countries and churches, for example. A naval historian provides an explanation why this might be the case.
Because it gives a gender to an inanimate object. It might make you seem a tiny bit pretentious.
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