Feminine describes the qualities a culture links with women — softness, grace, a particular way of dressing or speaking. A feminine handwriting, a feminine cut of jacket.
The word does two jobs at once, and it helps to keep them apart. Describing a person or a style, feminine is about how something reads to other people, and what counts as feminine changes with the century. In grammar it is a flat technical label: French nouns are masculine or feminine, and la table is feminine with nothing soft about it. Feminine is not female — female is biology, feminine is presentation, and a man can be called feminine while nobody doubts he is male.
Feminine goes back to nursing. Latin fēmina, a woman, comes from a root meaning the one who suckles, so the Latin word named a role rather than a sex.
Middle English
femynyne
English, today
feminine
Built from
From Middle English femynyne. From Middle English feminine,femynyne,femynyn, from Old French feminin,feminine, from Latin fēminīnus, from fēmina (“woman”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰeh₁-m̥h₁n-eh₂ (“(the one) nursing, breastfeeding”). Related to fetus, feminism, filial, fellatio.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA