feminine - Dictionary Definition : Vocabulary.com

Feminine is the opposite of masculine. If it has anything to do with girls and women, it's considered feminine.

Anything feminine is associated with females. In American culture, that includes wearing pink, playing with dolls, sporting high heels, and getting weepy during sad movies. Many women find the traditional feminine roles to be sexist and limiting, while many men pick on each other for acting in a stereotypical feminine manner. But ideas about what is feminine are always changing: pants used to only be a masculine thing to wear, for example.

PRIMARY MEANINGS OF: feminine

1	adj	associated with women and not with men
2	adj n	of grammatical gender a gender that refers chiefly (but not exclusively) to females or to objects classified as female
3	adj	(music or poetry) ending on an unaccented beat or syllable

FULL DEFINITIONS OF: feminine

1

adj associated with women and not with men

“feminine intuition”

Synonyms: female
being the sex (of plant or animal) that produces fertilizable gametes (ova) from which offspring develop; fair
attractively feminine; distaff, female
characteristic of or peculiar to a woman; maidenlike, maidenly
befitting or characteristic of a maiden; powder-puff
used of competitive activities in which only women take part

Antonyms:: masculine
associated with men and not with women; manful, manlike, manly
possessing qualities befitting a man; male
being the sex (of plant or animal) that produces gametes (spermatozoa) that perform the fertilizing function in generation; butch, macho
used of men; markedly masculine in appearance or manner; male, manful, manlike, manly, virile
characteristic of a man; mannish
characteristic of a man as distinguished from a woman; masculine
of grammatical gender; show more antonyms...

adj befitting or characteristic of a woman especially a mature woman

Synonyms:: womanly

: matronly
befitting or characteristic of a fully mature woman; womanlike
resembling a woman

Antonyms:: unwomanly
not womanly; hoydenish, tomboyish
used of girls; wild and boisterous; mannish
resembling or imitative of or suggestive of a man rather than a woman; unfeminine
not suitable for a woman; show more antonyms...

2

adj of grammatical gender

Antonyms:: masculine
of grammatical gender; neuter
of grammatical gender; masculine
associated with men and not with women; show more antonyms...

n a gender that refers chiefly (but not exclusively) to females or to objects classified as female

Type of:: gender, grammatical gender
a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness

3

adj (music or poetry) ending on an unaccented beat or syllable

“a feminine ending”

Synonyms: unstressed
not bearing a stress or accent