Word of the Week (WOW) is a weekly meme created by Heena Rathore P. It’s a fun way to improve vocabulary by learning new words every week.
To participate, simply do a post with your word and leave the link to your post as a comment on Heena’s WOW post.
Here is my WOW for this week:
Part of Speech: Adjective
(Adverb: Androgynously. Noun: Androgyny )
Pronunciation: an-drog-y-nous (an-droj’e-nes; ænˈdrɒdʒ ə nəs)
1. being both male and female; hermaphroditic.
2. having both masculine and feminine characteristics.
3. having an ambiguous sexual identity.
4. neither clearly masculine nor clearly feminine in appearance:
5. (biology) an individual animal or flower that has both male and female reproductive organs
cross-sexual, bisexual, unisexual, epicine, hermaphroditic
(near antonyms: masculine, feminine)
Early 17th century from the Latin androgynus and the Greek androgynos
Use in a sentence:
1. Rockin’ Reggie had the androgynous look of many rock stars.
2. He was a stunningly adgrogynous dancer.
Androgynous is an interesting word. I can appreciate how well it could be used in Sci-Fi novels and such like, to describe genderless beings.
In botany, androgynous is sometimes used instead of one of its synonyms, hermaphroditic. Examples of plants bearing both male and female reproductve organs include trees like birch, walnut oak and chestnut. The common plant, cuckoo pint, is often chosen as an example of a an androgynous flowering plant. Here are a couple of pictures of it: