  Many of the world's languages employ grammatical gender on the lexeme. For
example, in Spanish, the word for 'house' (casa) is feminine, whereas the word
for 'paper' (papel) is masculine. To a speaker of a genderless language, this
assignment seems to exist with neither rhyme nor reason. But is the assignment
of inanimate nouns to grammatical genders truly arbitrary? We present the first
large-scale investigation of the arbitrariness of noun-gender assignments. To
that end, we use canonical correlation analysis to correlate the grammatical
gender of inanimate nouns with an externally grounded definition of their
lexical semantics. We find that 18 languages exhibit a significant correlation
between grammatical gender and lexical semantics.
