| gender based on arbitrary assignment, without regard to the referent of a noun, as in French le livre (masculine), “the book,” and German das Mädchen (neuter), “the girl.” |
| grammatical gender | |
noun | |
| 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 [syn: gender] |
