feminine
/ˈfɛmɪnɪn
/adjective
1Having qualities or an appearance traditionally associated with women, especially delicacy and prettiness: the snowdrops gave a feminine touch to the table...
- A subtle feminine touch is given by using soft shades and delicate embroidery.
- The pink also gives it a more feminine and ladylike quality.
- It had a feminine girlish quality in the cut, but a bold, womanly quality in color.
Synonyms
womanly, womanlike, ladylike, girlish, female;
soft, delicate, gentle, tender, graceful, refined, modest
informal girly
archaic feminal
1.1Relating to women; female: he enjoys feminine company...
- Removing the board gently, he reached down into the hollow and retrieved a bundle of papers covered edge-to-edge in a pretty, feminine hand.
- They were pretty eyes, almost feminine, he decided, and it was probably that.
- The feminine side of me wants humanistic evaluations of interesting female people in the news, written by well-bred, well educated women.
2 Grammar Of or denoting a gender of nouns and adjectives, conventionally regarded as female.To be sure, it may be the case, in a gender language, that male and female persons will be designated by nouns of masculine and feminine gender, respectively....
- English is a great language - no masculine and feminine nouns, fewer tenses to our verbs and loads of nouns.
- A college class was discussing the fact that nouns in some foreign languages are either of masculine or feminine gender.
noun (the feminine)
1The female sex or gender: the association of the arts with the feminine...
- The Catholic understanding of the feminine would be lost forever if the Church had a female priesthood.
- In discussing drag, we talk about challenging the audience's conception of gender, or recovering the male performer's sense of the feminine.
- Early in the film, Janice's transgressions already resonate on a specific historical level and tap into older notions regarding the feminine.
2 Grammar A feminine word or form.A noun that is classified as feminine in one language might be masculine in another....
- Even today we refer to objects like ships in the feminine!
- After a long time, Michel fell asleep thinking about how the boat itself was named after a man, yet was always referred to in the feminine.
Derivatives
femininely
/ adverb ...- It's not just women who would make great leaders (sensually, femininely, in the light of science), but also gay people.
- A person who puts on a skirt or makeup sends an obvious signal that he or she is dressed femininely, but a person in pants and no makeup could be dressed as any gender.
- ‘At least one person thinks I look all right in this,’ she laughed, examining the femininely cut tuxedo she wore.
feminineness
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin femininus, from femina 'woman'.