Gender in grammar refers to the way words change form based on whether they are masculine, feminine, or neuter.

In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender. The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called the genders of that language.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gender as “a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms”.

Gender refers to whether a noun or pronoun is masculine, feminine, or neuter. While most English nouns are neutral (neuter gender), nouns related to people and animals often have specific genders.

Gender is a grammatical feature, in a family with person, number, and case. In the languages that have grammatical gender—according to a representative typological sample, almost half of the languages in the world—it is a property that separates nouns into classes.