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OneKitly

masculine

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmæskjʊlɪn//
  • United Kingdom//ˈmæskjələn//
  • United States//ˈmæskjələn//
  • Australia//ˈmæskjələn//

Of or pertaining to the male gender.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or pertaining to the male gender.

  2. 2

    Of or pertaining to the male sex; biologically male, not female.

  3. 3

    Belonging to males; typically used by males.

    “John”, “Paul”, and “Jake” are masculine names.

  4. 4

    Having the qualities stereotypically associated with men: virile, aggressive, not effeminate; manly.

    That lady, after her husband's death, held the reins with a masculine energy.

    […] a masculine church.

  5. 5

    Of, pertaining or belonging to the male grammatical gender, in languages that have gender distinctions. Being of the masculine class or grammatical gender, and inflected in that manner.

    The noun Student is masculine in German.

  6. 6

    Of, pertaining or belonging to the male grammatical gender, in languages that have gender distinctions. Being inflected in agreement with a masculine noun.

    German uses the masculine form of the definite article, der, with Student.

  7. 7

    Having the vowel harmony of a back vowel.

  8. 8

    Following or ending on a stressed syllable.

    Masculine caesura, masculine catalexis, masculine ending, masculine rhyme.

Etymology

From Middle English masculyne, masculyn, from Old French masculin, from Latin masculīnus, diminutive of masculus (“male, manly”), itself a diminutive of mās (“male”). Displaced native Old English werlīċ (literally “manly”).

noun

  1. 1

    The masculine gender.

    The masculine functions as the negative term in the opposition, i.e. when the gender is not defined, the masculine is used.

  2. 2

    A word of the masculine gender.

    As to the class to which the masculines of the strong declension belong, we repeat that […]

  3. 3

    That which is masculine.

    These forces would also seem to reflect the gender distinction that can be made with respect to the divine, the feminine associated with the divine as immanent within the finite and the masculine with the divine transcendence and the infinite.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA man.

    I think women, at least those who do their own work, would live very simply in that respect, if there were none of the masculines to feed.

Forms

plural
masculines
comparative
more masculine
superlative
most masculine
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).