Androgynos

Part of speech: adjective, noun

Definitions

1. A person whose gender identity or presentation is ambiguous, often blending characteristics of both masculinity and femininity
2. An individual reflecting a mixture of gender traits; this term can relate to clothing, behavior, or overall appearance
3. Someone exhibiting features or attributes traditionally associated with both genders, challenging conventional distinctions between male and female identities

Etymology: Ancient Greek "androgynos" was a compound of "anēr" (genitive "andros"), meaning man, and "gynē," meaning woman, so it literally meant "man-woman." Greek writers used it in several senses: as a noun for a hermaphrodite or intersex person, and as an adjective for someone whose gender was ambiguous or who had both male and female characteristics. Plato's "Symposium" gives the idea its most famous form, a myth in which humans were originally double beings, some male-female, that Zeus split in two. English borrowed the word in the 1600s, and its earliest English uses kept the Greek sense of hermaphroditic or having both sexes. Its modern meaning, a person whose gender identity or expression blends or falls outside conventional male and female categories, developed much later, mainly in the 20th century.

Synonyms: androgynous, hermaphrodite, intersex

Antonyms: gendered, binary