Basic Guidelines For English Spellings
READ THESE ARTICLESadjective
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.’
- ‘There was the glass ceiling, the unequal pay, and while feminine qualities of leadership transformed the work world, they did so often at a cost to personal life.’
- ‘Its methods should encompass intuition, emotional engagement, and other cognitive styles associated with a feminine sensibility.’
- ‘This, coupled with their pop music style and stereotypically feminine appearance, allowed them to be angry without being threatening.’
- ‘Violence remains a potential threat beneath the appearance of feminine softness and the protestations of peace and benevolence.’
- ‘In fact, some of the feminine qualities celebrated by many Victorians were increasingly cast in a negative light for both boys and girls.’
- ‘The voice was a man, and almost familiar, but it had a quiet, feminine quality to it that Ethan hadn't ever heard in a man's voice before.’
- ‘Both were excellent fund-raisers among the wealthy, and they kept up feminine appearances by favouring Parisian fashions.’
- ‘In the 1960s, young womanhood was defined as essentially concerned with a feminine appearance and attracting the admiring male gaze.’
- ‘The two paintings that Sala feels the strongest affinity for are the most recent and most overtly feminine ones.’
- ‘The season's clothes are feminine, pretty and anything but solid black, a dominant colour of many earlier seasons.’
womanly, womanlike, ladylike, girlish, femaleView synonyms- 1.1Relating to women; female.‘he enjoys feminine company’
- ‘The binary and fixed construction of masculine and feminine gender identities is strictly enforced through history, religions, and popular culture.’
- ‘All gender traits, feminine and masculine, must be valued but not assigned.’
- ‘That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction.’
- ‘There is no distinctively feminine opinion on the question.’
- ‘Did the erstwhile queen of Persia use her literary skills to record a feminine view of history?’
feminine, womanly, womanlike, ladylikeView synonyms
2Grammar
Of or denoting a gender of nouns and adjectives, conventionally regarded as female.- ‘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.’
- ‘Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into male and female groups and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer should be a masculine or a feminine noun.’
- ‘If he's memorizing French vocab, ask him if he knows the difference between masculine and feminine nouns.’
- ‘The word death in Polish is a feminine noun, and is thought of as a tall woman draped in white.’
- ‘Do Spanish adjectives have masculine and feminine forms?’
- ‘In Arabic grammar there are certain rules and criteria for feminine gender.’
- ‘Now you might argue, so why do you need a feminine suffix of the numeral when you have a noun which is masculine?’
- ‘This North Queensland language has four genders: masculine, feminine, edible and neuter.’
noun
the feminine1The female sex or gender.
‘the association of the arts with the feminine’- ‘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.’
- ‘After a decade or so when lad culture reigned supreme, there's a new willingness among men to engage with the negatives in their masculinity, and to embrace the feminine.’
- ‘Everything I've ever written could be said to be a hymn to the feminine.’
- ‘Saying what you want and how you feel is clearly the realm of the feminine.’
- ‘I mean we're talking about a virgin figure, an exalted virgin figure who according to Catholic doctrine remained a virgin, and so it's a particular kind of concept of the feminine.’
- ‘As in her conception of female sexuality, doubling and multiplying are associated with the feminine.’
- ‘On the social level, the plays perform gender-balancing acts through an elaboration of the feminine.’
- ‘It concerns the characteristics that a society or group attributes to the masculine or the feminine.’
- ‘It must be part of an inclusive approach to discussing a new history, which integrates the feminine with the masculine.’
- ‘Daphne functions at once as a mother and a lover, and her actions suggest the stereotypically masculine as well as the feminine.’
- ‘Nonetheless, the distinction between the masculine and feminine constitutes a significant aspect that informs the operation of seduction.’
- ‘While it is true that Margaret's scientific theories support the emergence of a new image of female selfhood, I would argue that they exceed such revaluing of the feminine.’
- ‘I was addressing the problem of celibate priests who are in danger of leading lives divorced from the feminine.’
- ‘The role of imagery of the feminine in philosophical texts is not unrelated to the fact that the philosophical tradition was dominated by men.’
2Grammar
A feminine word or form.‘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.’
Origin
Late Middle English from Latin femininus, from femina ‘woman’.
Pronunciation
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