In many languages, the gender of a noun, adjective or verb¹ is an important grammatical issue. A word's gender makes no practical difference to its meaning or application in the main, but it usually governs ending or agreement variables that the word may include, and often also its preceding article. For instance, 'a postman' in French is un facteur, while 'a postwoman' is une factrice.

Nouns do not usually change gender, so they do not change as a general rule. The most important aspect of gender, then, is adjectival agreement. Adjectives are gender neutral; they have no gender of their own. Instead, they take the gender of the noun they govern. In most languages, this means a change in the spelling, and sometimes the pronunciation, of the adjective depending on which gender they are meant to reflect.

Modern English is, however, largely free of these agreements, having gradually done away with them over the course of its evolution. In fact, there is only one adjective that still needs to be changed depending on whether it is employed to describe a man or a woman². With its origins in the 17th Century, from the French language, the word is 'blond', which gains an 'e' when applied to a female subject. No other adjective in the language undergoes a change like this in the modern tongue.