Other forms: sexes
Sex is being male or female, and also the physical act between partners. Both sexes, the opposite sex, sex education.
The first sense is the biological category, recorded on forms and in medical records; gender is the word usually used for the social and personal side, and keeping the two apart is what most careful writing now does. The second sense is the act itself, and is the ordinary neutral word for it. Note sexual, sexed; single-sex, meaning of one sex only; and sexism, which is prejudice on the basis of the first sense.
1nouncategoryThe category of being male or female.~36%
“The form asks for your name, date of birth and sex.”
2nounsexThe physical act between partners.~64%
“Sex education begins at roughly eleven in most schools.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sex is a category or an act.
Latin sexus may come from secare, to cut or divide — the division of a species into two. English took it in the fourteenth century meaning the category, and the sense of the act is only about a century old.
Proto-Indo-European
*sek-
Latin
sexus
Old French
sexe
Middle English
sexe
English, today
sex
Built from
From Middle English sexe, from Old French sexe, from Latin sexus. From Middle English sexe (“sex [distinction between male and female] and gender”), from Old French sexe (“genitals; gender”), from Latin sexus (“gender; gender traits; males or females; genitals”), from Proto-Italic seksus, from Proto-Indo-European séksus, from sek- (“to cut, cut off, sever”), thus meaning "section, division" (into male and female). Displaced native Old English hād (“sex, gender”). Usage for women influenced by Middle French sexe (“women”) (attested in 1580). Usage for third and additional sexes calqued from French troisième sexe, referring to masculine women in 1817 and homosexuals in 1847. First used by Lord Byron and others in English in reference to Catholic clergy. Usage for sexual intercourse first attested in 1899 (in the writings of H. G. Wells).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA