Meaning of feminine in English:

feminine

Pronunciation /ˈfɛmɪnɪn/

See synonyms for feminine

Translate feminine into Spanish

adjective

1Having qualities or an appearance traditionally associated with women.
‘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, female
View synonyms
1. 1.1Relating to women; female.
  ‘a feminine voice’
  ‘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, women's, of women, womanly, womanlike, she-
  View 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 feminine

1The 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.’