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neuter

Pronunciation: /ˈnjuːtə/

The English word “neuter” has 17 meanings listed here.

adjective

  1. Neutral; on neither side; neither one thing nor another.
  2. Having a form which is not masculine nor feminine; or having a form which is not of common gender.
  3. Intransitive.
  4. Sexless: having no or imperfectly developed sex organs.
  5. Sexless, non-sexual.
  6. Castrated; having had the reproductive organs removed.

noun

  1. An organism, either vegetable or animal, which at its maturity has no generative organs, or but imperfectly developed ones, as a plant without stamens or pistils, as the garden Hydrangea; especially, one of the imperfectly developed females of certain social insects, as of the ant and the common honeybee, which perform the labors of the community, and are called workers.
  2. One who has been neutered; eunuch.
  3. The act of neutering (typically an animal)
  4. A person who takes no part in a contest; someone remaining neutral.
  5. The neuter gender.
  6. A noun of the neuter gender; any one of those words which have the terminations usually found in neuter words.
  7. An intransitive verb or state-of-being verb.

verb

  1. To remove sex organs from an animal to prevent it from having offspring; to castrate or spay, particularly as applied to domestic animals.
  2. To rid of sexuality.
  3. To drastically reduce the effectiveness of something.
  4. To make grammatically neuter.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English neutre, from Latin neuter, from ne (“not”) + uter (“either”), a semantic loan from Koine Greek οὐδέτερος (oudéteros); compare English either, English whether, and neither.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.