Grammatical Gender

Old English and other Indo-European languages had a three-fold distinction of a grammatical category called gender.

  • It's not the same as what is commonly called gender, where a rooster might be masculine (he), a mare feminine (she), and a barn neuter (it). Instead, in Old English (and in other languages), the way words were assigned to a gender had little to do with biological sex or social constructions, and everything to do with the form of the word and how it changes in different circumstances. The association between word and gender is arbitrary.

The following exercise will walk you through some features of gender in Old English. Print it out, complete it, and bring it to your next section.