The word gender describes the state of being male, female, or neither. Some languages have a system of grammatical gender (also known as noun classes); while a noun may be described as "masculine" or "feminine" by convention, this has no necessary connection to the natural gender of the thing described. Likewise, a wide variety of phenomena may have gendered characteristics ascribed to them, either by analogy to male and female bodies, such as with the gender of connectors and fasteners, or due to social norms, such as interpreting the color pink as feminine and blue as masculine. In social sciences, the word "gender" is sometimes used in contrast to biological sex, to emphasise a social, cultural or psychological dimension. The discipline of gender studies investigates the nature of sex and gender in a social context.

Etymology and usage

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Gender comes from Middle English gendre, from Latin genus, all meaning "kind", "sort", or "type". Ultimately from the proto Indo European root, gen, which is also the root for "kind", "king" and many others. It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in gene, genesis and oxygen. As a verb, it is used for to breed in the King James Bible:

Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. — Leviticus, 19:19

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