In this article we’ll discuss about the nouns with common gender and see the list of examples of the same. Later we’ll understand how common gender nouns are used in a sentence and how they are useful.
What is a Common Gender?
The nouns which are used for both males and females are referred to as common gender nouns.
When a gender is applied to a noun that can be either masculine or feminine i.e. the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost, this is what is called a Common Gender.
You can also have a look at the list of different types of Gender and see what other genders mean and How common gender is different from others.
100 Examples of Common Gender Nouns
Following is an alphabetically sorted list of most common gender words:
- Ant
- Baby
- Bear
- Bird
- Cat
- Cattle
- Child
- Chicken
- Companion
- Comrade
- Cousin
- Dancer
- Dog
- Donkey
- Doctor
- Dentist
- Deer
- Director
- Duck
- Enemy
- Elephant
- Elk
- Employee
- Friend
- Fox
- Guardian
- Gorilla
- God
- Goat
- Goose
- Guest
- Hamster
- Hedgehog
- Horse
- Infant
- Lion
- Lobster
- Minister
- Monkey
- Mouse
- Musician
- Neighbor
- Owner
- Owl
- Parent
- Passenger
- Peafowl
- Pig
- President
- Pupil
- Plumber
- Rabbit
- Relative
- Ruler
- Racer
- Sheep
- Singer
- Servant
- Student
- Swan
- Tutor
- Teacher
- Walker
- Whale
- Wolf
- Worker
- Zebra
By looking at the list you’ll observe one thing that Nouns which denote a class of people like doctor, student, singer etc. are usually of common gender. And the best part here is even if we don’t know the sex of the person of particular class we can still refer to that person. Let us see this concept with the help of an example – “I need a doctor”.
Here doctor is a common gender noun where we are not sure of the sex of doctor it can be either male or female.
Let us see a one more example : “I want a Teacher”.
Here user is putting his request of a teacher where he doesn’t clearly specifies the gender. So it really doesn’t’ matter what the gender of teacher is. Male or Female any teacher would work for him.
Common gender words help in communication and make it more clear. Let’s have a quick recap of some of the words using the following image.
Keep exploring EnglishBix to learn more about different gender types and when they are used.
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