gender

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A grammatical category, often designated as male, female, or neuter, used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms.
• noun The fact of being classified as belonging to such a category.
• noun Either of the two divisions, designated female and male, by which most organisms are classified on the basis of their reproductive organs and functions; sex.
• noun One's identity as female or male or as neither entirely female nor entirely male.
• noun Females or males considered as a group.
• transitive verb To engender.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Kind; sort; class; genus.
• noun Sex, male or female.
• noun In grammar, a formal distinction in words, apparently founded on and in part expressing differences of sexual character, as male and female, or as male, female, or of neither sex (neuter).
• To beget; procreate; generate; engender.
• Hence To give rise to; bring out or forth.
• To copulate; breed.
• noun A Javanese musical instrument of the xylophone class.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To beget; to engender.
• noun obsolete Kind; sort.
• noun Sex, male or female.
• noun (Gram.) A classification of nouns, primarily according to sex; and secondarily according to some fancied or imputed quality associated with sex.
• intransitive verb rare To copulate; to breed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun grammar A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech), such as masculine, feminine, neuter or common.
• noun The biological sex of an individual (usually male or female).
• noun The mental analogue of sex: one's maleness (masculinity) or femaleness (femininity). (Also called gender identity.)
• noun The socio-cultural phenomenon of the division of people into various categories such as "male" and "female", with each having associated clothing, roles, stereotypes, etc.
• noun obsolete A division between classes or kinds.
• verb sociology, of a person To assign (someone else) a gender; to perceive (someone else) as having a gender.
• verb archaic To engender.
• verb archaic or obsolete To breed.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness
• noun the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles