The type of biological distinction used in English is quite different from the more common distinction found in languages that use grammatical gender. Whereas natural gender is based on sex (male and female), grammatical gender is based on the type of noun (masculine and feminine) and is not tied to sex. In this latter sense, nouns are classified according to their gender class and, typically, articles and adjectives have different forms to “agree with” the gender of the noun.

Spanish, for example, has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, illustrated by the expressions el sol (“the sun”) and la luna (“the moon”). German uses three genders, masculine der Mond (“the moon”), feminine die Sonne (“the sun”) and neuter das Feuer (“the fire”). The different forms of the articles in both the Spanish (el orla) and German (der, die or das) examples correspond to differences in the gender class of the nouns.

We should emphasize that this gender distinction is not based on a distinction in sex. A young girl is biologically “female,” but the German noun das Ma¨ dchen used to talk about her is grammatically neuter. The French noun in le livre (“the book”) is grammatically masculine, but neither we nor the French people consider a book to be biologically male. So, the grammatical category of gender is very usefully applied in describing a number of languages (including Latin), but may not be appropriate for describing forms in other languages such as English.