gender [LME] The words gender and engender [ME] go back via Old French to Latin genus ‘birth, family, nation’, a word that was reborrowed in the early 17th century for scientific classification, although it had been in use 50 years earlier in logic. In modern French the ‘d’ was lost to produce genre, a word reborrowed in the early 19th century. Generate [LME], generation [ME], engender [ME], generosity [LME], genial [M16th], and degenerate [LME] are all from the same source. Since the 1990s cisgender has been used for someone who identifies with their sex at birth, from Latin cis ‘on this side of’ modelled on transgender [1970s].