Word for both male and female

For languages with two genders, is there a name for a noun (or pronoun, adjective, etc) which can be of either gender?

This seems to be quite common for names of professions, for instance, in Latin based languages:

• dentista (Spanish, Portuguese)
• dentiste (French)

The grammatical gender, in these cases, follows the natural gender.

(El buen / La buena) dentista.

Dictionaries tend to identify the gender of the noun by specifying both male and female:

1. Wiktionnaire:

   dentiste /dɑ̃.tist/ masculin et féminin identiques

2. Wiktionary Portuguese entry:

   dentista m f (plural dentistas)

Is there a more precise, technical, or concise way to refer to such nouns?

When sipping cocktails and speaking to new Linguist nerds I’ve met on a bus trip through Europe, must I refer to «That class of nouns for which gender is determined by the natural gender of the referred object?» Or can I speak of, for instanced «morphological gender», «dual gender», etc?

When doing a (purely hypothetical—this isn’t a homework question) test, and asked to identify the gender for a list of nouns, must I answer ‘M’, ‘F’, and ‘M/F’? Or can the latter category be ‘D’ (dual?) or ‘N’ (natural)?

In many languages, the gender of nouns is divided into three categories; masculine, feminine and neuter.

Male people and animals belong to the masculine gender (e.g. boy, son, or uncle) and female people and animals belong to the feminine gender (e.g. girl, daughter, or aunt).

In English, most nouns are neither masculine or feminine. They do not refer specifically to males or females. They are neuter.

A gender-specific noun refers only to males or only to females. Gender-specific nouns traditionally have separate forms for males and females.

Nowadays, people prefer not to use feminine forms of some nouns. For example, we can use the word ‘actor’ for both male and female.

We can also use neutral words instead of some gender-specific nouns.  For example, we can use police officer instead of policeman or policewoman.

Some animals names have different forms for males and females

English is not known for having gender specific nouns like some other languages (for example Spanish or French), but gender specific nouns do exist in English.  Because English does not have as many gender specific nouns as other languages, one nice thing about English is that you don’t have to worry about gender agreement between nouns and adjectives.  So, when you start thinking about how hard it is to learn English, just remember that you don’t have to worry too much about noun gender and gender agreement in English. (Learning how to do this in other languages is something that most English speakers find very difficult.)

There are a small number of words in English that do have different forms to indicate male and female gender though, but really these are very few.  Other than gender specific words for some animals (like: buck and deer, gander and geese) and words like man, woman, girl, boy, mother and father, English has only a few dozen gender specific nouns. Below I have listed some of the most common gender specific nouns found in English.  If a neutral, non-gender specific, form of the word exists I also listed that word too. If a neutral form of the word doesn’t exist, the male form of the word usually becomes the de facto neutral version. For some words, often words that are related to professions, if no female version of the word exists a neutral word has been created. Take a look at these and see if there are any new words you can add to your vocabulary.

Before its use in the LGBQT community, bigender was an early 20th-century biological term for plants that possess both male and female reproductive parts. 

Plants are bigender

— Mxtravisage🧜‍♀️ (@xtravisage) January 30, 2019

The term evolved to refer to something suitable for both male and female genders, e.g., bigender college dorms, where men and women will live on the same floor.

Bigender was applied to gender identity as early as the 1970s. That said, the concept of bigender long predates the term, as exemplified by the Native American concept of Two Spirits– a person embodying both male and females identities.  

In 1999, the San Francisco Department of Public Health conducted a survey of transgender individuals, finding that 3% of the people assigned a male gender at birth consider themselves bigender, and 8% of those assigned female at birth identified as bigender. 

The term bigender spread in the 1990s and 2000s with the increasing awareness and visibility of nonbinary gender identities, especially through the LGBTQ community online. In 2014, many social media platforms began to acknowledge different gender identities, with platforms like Facebook and OKCupid allowing people to select bigender for their profiles.

Individuals who identify as bigender tend not to be considered gender-fluid, which is a nonbinary identity where a person is a non-fixed range of gender identities. Some individuals may experience three gender identities, or trigender.

pansexuality is real it’s not about being attracted to trans people because they fall into the binary category it’s about non binary people and trigender and genderfluid people too. pic.twitter.com/bRUzTNw9Pj

— mimi (@yeoludawon) December 29, 2018

Related Pages
Singular And Plural Nouns
Countable And Uncountable Nouns
More Lessons On English Grammar

There are four types of gender nouns in English.

• Masculine gender nouns are words for men, boys, and male
  animals.
• Feminine gender nouns are words for women, girls and female
  animals.
• Common gender nouns are nouns that are used for both males
  and females.
• Neuter gender nouns are words for things that are not alive.

Gender Nouns For People

Here are some examples of masculine and feminine nouns for people.

Gender Nouns For Animals

Here are some examples of masculine and feminine nouns for animals.

Common Gender Nouns

Here are some examples of common gender nouns that used for
both males and females.

Neuter Gender Nouns

Here are some examples of neuter gender nouns that are used
for objects and places.

Gender of Nouns Flashcards: Masculine, Feminine, Common and Neuter

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