女性
Meaning in Englishwoman, female
Animated kanji stroke order
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Word context
What it means
What does 女性 mean? It means 'woman' or 'female' in Japanese and refers to the female sex or adult women as a social and demographic category, used as a neutral and often formal term to talk about gender or groups of women.
Main meanings
- Used as a demographic label to indicate the female segment of a population or audience.
- Acts as a polite or formal referent for an adult woman, contrastive with casual words for 'woman'.
- Functions attributively in compounds to mark female-specific products, spaces, or roles.
- Can denote the concept of femininity or female characteristics in abstract usage.
How to use it
Common in formal speech, writing, media, signage and official contexts to refer to women or the female category; appears in demographic reports, medical and legal language, and as a modifier in phrases indicating 'for women' or 'female-only'; it is less common in intimate casual talk where other native terms often appear.
Variants and close terms
- 女 (onna) — woman (more casual, everyday)
- 婦人 (fujin) — lady, women (formal, polite)
- 少女 (shoujo) — young girl, female youth (age-specific)
- 男性 (dansei) — man, male (antonym)
Composition
- 女 (onna) — 'woman, female'; represents the idea of a female person.
- 性 (sei) — 'nature, sex, gender'; denotes the quality or category of sex/gender.
- Combined, the two characters form a compound meaning 'female sex' or 'womanhood', producing the neutral/formal noun for women.
Origin
The compound comes from Sino-Japanese vocabulary derived from Chinese characters and has been part of Japanese written registers for centuries; its use broadened in modern society (Meiji period onward) as census, legal, and public-health classifications and discourse adopted standardized gender terms.
Word class
noun; also used as a suffix (名詞、接尾辞)