Word Type
Feminine can be an adverb, an adjective or a noun.
feminine used as an adverb:
- Of or pertaining to woman.
- Having the qualities of a woman.
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
feminine used as an adjective:
- Of the female sex; biologically female, not male, womanly.
- Belonging to females; appropriated to, or used by, females.
"Mary, Elizabeth, and Edith are feminine names." - Having the qualities associated with a woman or the female gender; suitable to, or characteristic of, a woman; nurturing; not masculine or aggressive.
"Her heavenly form Angelic, but more soft and feminine — John Milton" - Grammatical gender distinction in languages that have it such as Spanish and Hindi that describes nouns including those pertaining to females and objects that are assigned the feminine gender.
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
feminine used as a noun:
- The female principle
- (Obsolete or Colloquial): A woman.
"They guide the feminines toward the palace — Richard Hakluyt" - Any one of those words which are the appellations of females, or which have the terminations usually found in such words; as, actress, songstress, abbess, executrix.
"There are but few true feminines in English — Latham"
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is feminine?
- Adjective usage: Mary, Elizabeth, and Edith are feminine names.
- Adjective usage: Her heavenly form Angelic, but more soft and feminine — John Milton
- Adjective usage: Her letters are remarkably deficient in feminine ease and grace — Thomas Babington Macaulay
- Adjective usage: Ninus being esteemed no man of war at all, but altogether feminine, and subject to ease and delicacy — Sir Walter Raleigh
- Noun usage: They guide the feminines toward the palace — Richard Hakluyt
- Noun usage: There are but few true feminines in English — Latham
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of feminine are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of feminine, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
