Androgynous

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ænˈdɹɒd͡ʒ.ɪn.əs/

Definitions

1. Having both masculine and feminine characteristics in appearance or nature, making gender difficult to determine
2. Displaying physical traits or personal qualities that blend masculine and feminine attributes in a way that obscures conventional gender presentation
3. Possessing an ambiguous or indeterminate gender expression through a combination of male and female characteristics

Etymology: Plato gave the word its most famous story. In the "Symposium," the comic playwright Aristophanes describes humans as originally double creatures, some wholly male, some wholly female, and some combining both, each later split in two by Zeus. The Greek "andrógynos" joined "anēr" (man) and "gunē" (woman), so the word named a single body holding both sexes, not a person caught between them. The Greek term passed into Latin as "androgynus," which meant "man-woman" and was used for hermaphrodites. English took the word from that Latin source, and it has since shifted from describing physical bodies to describing gender expression, where it now means a blend of male and female characteristics that resists a clear category.

Synonyms: gender-neutral, unisex, androgenous

Antonyms: gendered, feminine, masculine