féminin

Féminin is a grammatical gender used in languages with gender systems to mark nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns that refer to female beings or to feminine concepts. In French, the term féminin appears both as a noun (le féminin, the feminine gender) and as an adjective meaning female or feminine when describing nouns.

In French, feminine forms are often created from masculine forms by adding a suffix, most commonly -e (petit → petite). Many feminine forms are irregular (heureux → heureuse), and some feminine nouns are not transparently related to their masculine counterparts (homme → femme). Examples include la fille (girl), la femme (woman), and amie (female friend).

Agreement rules require determiners and adjectives to match the noun's gender and number (le petit garçon, la petite fille; les amis, les amies). The feminine form also interacts with other parts of speech in concordance systems across the language.

Across languages, feminine is a standard grammatical gender found in systems such as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese (where many nouns and adjectives end in -a for feminine), and in German, where feminine nouns take the definite article die. In many languages, grammatical gender does not align perfectly with biological sex, and gender assignment can be historical or phonological rather than purely semantic.

The concept also appears in gender studies as a category for analyzing femininity as a social and linguistic construct. The etymology traces to Latin femininus, from femina meaning woman.