Where do the words “sex” and “gender” come from, and where are they now in their semantic journey? A fellow reader of the Grammarphobia blog asked the question, and here is the answer!

Q: What explains the increasing use of “gender” in place of “sex” in sexual terminology? For me, prudishness doesn’t explain it.

A: The nouns “sex” and “gender” have been used interchangeably since the Middle Ages for either of the two primary biological forms of a species.

Although the two terms are still often used like that, they began to go their separate ways in the 20th century. Here’s the story.

English borrowed “sex” in the late 14th century from Middle French, but the ultimate source is classical Latin, where sexus referred to the “state of being male or female,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When “sex” first appeared in English, the dictionary says, it meant “either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from Genesis 6:19 in the Wycliffe Bible of the early 1380s. In this passage, the term is used for the sex of the animals in Noah’s ark:

“Of all þingez hauyng soule of eny flesch: two þou schalt brynge in to þe ark, þat male sex & female: lyuen with þe” (“Of all things living of any flesh, two thou shall bring into the ark, that of the male sex & female, to live with thee”).

When “gender” appeared in the mid-14th century, it was a term for a grammatical subclass of nouns and pronouns distinguished by their different inflections.

The earliest OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from the gender-bending legend of St. Theodora of Alexandria, who is said to have betrayed her husband and then done penance by dressing as a man and entering a monastery:

“Hire name, þat was femynyn / Of gendre, heo turned in to masculyn. / Theodora hire name was, parde, / But Theodorus heo hiht, seide heo” (“Her name, which was feminine of gender, she turned into masculine. Theoroda, her name was, by God, but Theodorus she was called, she said”).

From “De S. Theododra,” circa 1350, in Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden (Collected Old English Legends), 1878, edited by Carl Horstmann.

In the 15th century, the OED says, “gender” came to mean “males or females viewed as a group,” which the dictionary describes as the same sense as the original meaning of “sex.”

The earliest Oxford example is from the 1474 will of Thomas Stonor: “His heyres of the masculine gender of his body lawfully begoten” (from The Stonor Letters and Papers, 1919, edited by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford).

At the end of the 19th century, the noun “sex” took on an additional meaning—the sexual act—a sense the OED defines as “physical contact between individuals involving sexual stimulation; sexual activity or behaviour, spec. sexual intercourse, copulation.”

The dictionary suggests that the association of the noun “sex” with sexual relations ultimately altered the old senses of “sex” and “gender” for the principal biological forms of humans and other creatures.

In the 20th century, Oxford says, “sex came increasingly to mean sexual intercourse” and “gender began to replace it (in early use euphemistically) as the usual word for the biological grouping of males and females.”

The dictionary adds that the noun “gender” “is now often merged with or coloured by a sense that developed in the mid-20th century in psychology and sociology:

“The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one’s sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way.”

The first Oxford citation for this new sense of “gender” is from “Sanity and Hazard in Childhood,” an article by Madison Bentley in The American Journal of Psychology, April 1945:

“In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’ ”

Despite the evolving meaning of “gender,” the entries for the term in some standard dictionaries include both the old biological and the new social senses.

Merriam-Webster, for example, has two definitions for “gender” used in the ways we’re discussing:

(1) “either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures.”

(2) “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.”

And a search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which compares terms in digitized books, suggests that “sex” and “gender” are still both being used in the old biological sense.

Merriam-Webster says in a usage guide that “among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits.”

However, the dictionary adds, and we agree, that the “usage of sex and gender is by no means settled.”

Yann LeCun‘s evaluation of political versus linguistic errors:

His comment is no doubt meant as a joke, but it’s worth exploring the usage that bothers him.

To start with, the English word plummet has already been on a long morpho-syntactic and semantic journey (like nearly all other words). It started as a noun in Old French, plommet, the diminutive of plom “lead”, meaning “ball of lead, plumb bob“, referring to a (typically lead) weight attached to a “plumb line”. Wikipedia tells us that

The instrument has been used since at least the time of ancient Egypt to ensure that constructions are “plumb”, or vertical. It is also used in surveying, to establish the nadir (opposite of zenith) with respect to gravity of a point in space.

And also, used by sailors to estimate the depth of water.

The noun plummet, under various spellings, was borrowed into English as early the 14th century, and of course was also used metaphorically, as in this example from Shackerley Marmion’s 1632 play Hollands Leaguer:

And when I haue done, I’de faine see all your Artists,
Your Polititians with their Instruments
And Plummets of wit, sound the depth of mee.

And as always, the metaphorical extension got looser, to the point that the noun plummet came to be used to mean simply a “rapid fall” — though this usage seems to be relatively recent, with the OED’s first citation from 1957:

1957 After his plummet from fame, Keaton became a writer. Atchison (Kansas) Daily Globe

Also, like many other English nouns, plummet was soon used as a verb — though interestingly, the OED tells us that the first uses were transitive, connected to the depth-sounding sense of the noun:

1620 This ought to be the barre, cancell and limit of our too scrutinous nature, which often will assay to plummet the fathomlesse and bottomlesse sea of Gods most secret and hidden actions. T. Walkington, Rabboni

The (now more common) intransitive use, meaning (literally or figuratively) “To drop or fall rapidly or precipitously”, came a couple of hundred years later, with the OED’s first citation from 1845:

1845 Our capacity for delight plummeted. N. P. Willis, Dashes at Life with Free Pencil

OK, so what about the usage that bothered Yann LeCun:

In just 52 days, Trump has started a global trade war, plummeted the stock market, fired thousands of federal workers, slashed government funding, and sparked fears of a recession.

The author of that sentence has evolved plummet following the pattern of (the English version of) the causative-inchoative alternation:

The Causative/Inchoative alternation involves pairs of verbs, one of which is causative and the other non-causative syntactically and semantically (e.g., John broke the window vs. The window broke). In its causative use, an alternating verb is used transitively and understood as externally caused. When used non-causatively, the verb is intransitive and interpreted as spontaneous.

(Note that inchoative in this context means something like “change of state”, applied to the intransitive subject; and in the (transitive) causative version, the subject causes the object to the undergo the state change.)

There are many English verbs exhibiting this alternation — boil, melt, sink, open, bake, bounce, blacken, hang, close, cook, cool, dry, freeze, move, open, roll, rotate, spin, twist, shatter, thaw, thicken, whiten, widen, march, jump, …

And it’s common in English to extend this pattern to create a causative transitive verb from an intransitive inchoative one, as I did with evolve in an earlier sentence (though others have done this before me…).

But attempts at such extension don’t always go smoothly, and plummet is not the only example of possible failure. Thus fall is an intransitive inchoative verb, but “*Those actions are going to fall the market” doesn’t work. Why?

This post is already too long, so for now I’ll just direct you to Beth Levin and Malka Rapaport Hovav, “A preliminary analysis of causative verbs in English“, Lingua 1994:

This paper investigates the phenomena that come under the label ‘causative alternation’ in English, as illustrated in the transitive and intransitive sentence pair Antonia broke the vase / The vase broke. Central to our analysis is a distinction between verbs which are inherently monadic and verbs which are inherently dyadic. Given this distinction, much of the relevant data is explained by distinguishing two processes that give rise to causative alternation verbs. The first, and by far more pervasive process, forms lexical detransitive verbs from certain transitive verbs with a causative meaning. The second process, which is more restricted in its scope, results in the existence of causative transitive verbs related to some intransitive verbs. Finally, this study provides further insight into the semantic underpinnings of the Unaccusativity Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978).

Among other things, they note the difference between “verbs of manner of motion such as roll, run, jog, and bounce“, which have causative counterparts, and “verbs of directed motion such as come, go, rise, and fall“, which don’t. You can read the paper to learn their theory of why this matters — but we can note that the intransitive verb plummet is arguably in between those categories, interpretable either way.

None of the dictionaries that I’ve checked have a causative-transitive sense for plummet = “cause to fall rapidly”, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read it — but it wouldn’t be a shock to find other examples, and it’s also understandable that it would trigger someone’s “wrong!” reaction.