wla@ccieng6.UUCP ( BAND William L. Anderson) (12/19/83)
Dictionary definitions of gender:
1. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language,
Second College Edition (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing
Company, 1968)
gender n., 1. Gram. a) the formal classification by which
nouns and pronouns (and often accompanying modifiers)
are grouped and inflected, or changed in form,
so as to control certain syntactic relationships:
although gender is not a formal feature of English,
some nouns and the third person singular pronouns
are distinguished according to sex or the lack
of sex (man, or he, masculine gender; woman or
she, femininie gender; door or it, neuter gender):
in most Indo-European languages, and in others,
gender is not necessarily correlated with sex
b) any one of such groupings, or an inflectional
form showing membership in such a group.
2. [Colloq.] sex
2. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
New College Edition (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1981)
gender n., 1. Grammar. a. Any set of two or more
categories, such as masculine,feminine, and
neuter, into which words are divided according
to sex, animation, psychological associations,
or some other characteristic, and that determine
agreement with or the selection of modifiers,
referents, or grammatical forms. b. One category
of such a set. c. The classification of a word
or grammatical form in such a category. d. The
distinguishing form or forms used. 2. Classification
of -sex; sex.
3. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.:
G & C Merriam Co., 1981)
gender n 1: sex <black divinities of the feminine ~ --
Charles Dickens> 2 a: a subclass within a grammatical
class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a
language that is partly arbitrary but also partly
based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape,
social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that
determines agreement with and selection of other
words or grammatical forms b: membership of a word
or a grammatical form in such a subclass c: an
inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass
So, after this bit of research, what do we now know about
the use of gender in place of sex? It seems to depend on
which dictionary you prefer, doesn't it?
Bill Anderson
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