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Glite Dictionary
⚪ No specific gender 🔤 No grammatical gender
genderless

genderless

5.1
Not marked as masculine or feminine in grammar
  • adjective
  • /ˈdʒɛndərləs/
  • Specialized
translation icon : sin género
  • We prefer "it" or the genderless Finnish pronoun "hen."

Examples

  • Many people now advocate for using "they" as a genderless pronoun to be more inclusive.

  • In some cultures, objects can be referred to using genderless language that does not assign male or female pronouns.

  • I have since trained myself to use "she" and "her" rather than "he" and "him" when describing a genderless general person, but I still occasionally slip.

    Blog text (29)

  • The language reform proposal suggested adopting genderless terms in official documents.

Synonyms

ungendered
vsgenderless
  • Specialized
7.4

Not marked as masculine, feminine, or neuter in a language

is the same idea but focuses on lack of masculine or feminine marking only

Antonyms

gendered
  • Specialized
1 5.7

Having words that are masculine or feminine in grammar

Surface Forms

genderless positive

Morphology

genderless = gender (transparent) = gender + less

Built transparently from 'gender' (here meaning grammatical gender) + '-less' to mean 'without grammatical gender'.

Etymology

Genderless is made of gender and -less. The part gender comes from an old Latin word meaning 'kind' (like in genre) and -less means 'without', so in grammar genderless describes words that are not shown as 'male' or 'female', for example the English word 'child'.