Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
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Gender Etymology
gender (n.)
c. 1300, "kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits," from Old French gendre, genre "kind, species; character; gender" (12c., Modern French genre), from stem of Latin genus (genitive generis) "race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species," also "(male or female) sex," from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.
Also used in Latin to translate Aristotle's Greek grammatical term genos. The grammatical sense is attested in English from late 14c. The -d- is a phonetic accretion in Old French (compare sound (n.1)).
The "male-or-female sex" sense is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for "sex of a human being," in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963. Gender-bender is from 1977, popularized from 1980, with reference to pop star David Bowie.
gender (v.)
"to bring forth," late 14c., from Old French gendrer, genrer "engender, beget, give birth to," from Latin generare "to engender, beget, produce" (see generation). Related: Gendered; gendering.
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The current definition of gender is based in feminist theory and is a conceptual one. It is relatively new. If an individual has yet to subscribe to that feminist theory, then likely they still believe sex/gender are interchangeable terms. Although, it's not correct at all to use them interchangeably in English. However, because people felt funny saying the word sex, it was more often than not that people used gender in place of it as a casual form. Hence that usage...
Gender originally was used in linguistics to refer to qualities of nouns and other linguistic properties that were indexed by a sexual characteristics. i.e. sex-specific pronouns, verb conjugations, etc...
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender...logy_and_usage
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Etymology and usage
The modern English word gender comes from the Middle English gender, gendre, a loanword from Anglo-Norman and Middle French gendre. This, in turn, came from Latin genus. Both words mean "kind", "type", or "sort". They derive ultimately from a widely attested Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root gen-,[9][10] which is also the source of kin, kind, king, and many other English words.[11] It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind, also genre sexuel) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in gene, genesis, and oxygen. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of gender as "kind" had already become obsolete.
The word was still widely attested, however, in the specific sense of grammatical gender (the assignment of nouns to categories such as masculine, feminine and neuter). According to Aristotle, this concept was introduced by the Greek philosopher Protagoras.[12]
In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler stated that the definition of the word pertained to this grammar-related meaning:
"Gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder."[13]
The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates at least back to 1945,[14] and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards (see § Feminism theory and gender studies below). The theory was that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of gender.
The popular use of gender simply as an alternative to sex (as a biological category) is also widespread, although attempts are still made to preserve the distinction. The American Heritage Dictionary (2000) uses the following two sentences to illustrate the difference, noting that the distinction "is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels."[15]
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Source: https://www.drlemon.com/Grammar/gender.html
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Gender in the Spanish language
All Spanish words have gender. What does it mean to have gender in language? Why are some words called masculine and others feminine? Does gender have anything to do with the meaning of the word itself? The answer to that is "not usually."
Notice that the expression for "Good morning" is Buenos días while the expressions for "Good afternoon" and "Good evening" are Buenas tardes and Buenas noches, respectively. This difference is a result of gender, the idea of words being masculine or feminine: Tardes (afternoons) and Noches (nights) are feminine words while Días (days) is a masculine word.
El libro/un libro [the book/a book] is masculine because it ends in o and uses the articles el and un. It has nothing to do with whether books are read or written by men.
La policía [the police force] is a feminine word but that doesn't mean that it is run or staffed by women, or is a feminine profession.
However, words that refer directly to people (or animals) then does reflect the gender of the actual person being described. For example, the word for “son” is hijo and the word for "daughter" is hija. The same occurs for the words for "mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, wife," etc.
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