a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness
"In Spanish class, my teacher reminded us that even though "mesa" (table) looks like a feminine noun because of the article, we must agree with its gender by using feminine adjectives."
Class; kind.
"The new catalog is organized by gender, so you can easily find tools for both men and women."
In plain English: Gender is the social role and identity that society assigns to people based on whether they are male, female, or something else.
"The school offers separate sports teams for each gender."
Usage: In modern everyday usage, gender refers specifically to the social and cultural roles associated with being male or female, distinct from biological sex. Do not use this term to mean "class" or "kind," which are the correct words for those contexts.
To assign a gender to (a person); to perceive as having a gender; to address using terms (pronouns, nouns, adjectives...) that express a certain gender.
"The new policy was designed to engender a sense of trust among the employees."
To engender.
In plain English: To gender something means to describe it as male or female based on its appearance.
"The gender of that old computer program needs to be changed so it works with the new system."
Usage: The word gender is not used as a verb in standard English; instead, use the verb engender to mean causing something to arise or bringing about a particular feeling or situation. Using gender as a verb is a common error that confuses the noun for biological sex or social roles with its related root meaning.
The word gender entered English from Old French, which borrowed it from the Latin genere, meaning "type" or "kind." Although related to words like genre and genus, this specific term for biological sex developed as a noun before the associated verb appeared.