Gendered nouns exist in many languages, and grammatical gender does not always match the real world.

The longer version

Noun classes sort words into groups that control agreement, and the sorting is only loosely tied to sex. In German the word for a young woman is neuter because a diminutive ending decides the class, and the moon and sun take opposite classes depending on the language.

English lost nearly all of this, keeping distinctions only in pronouns, which is why the system feels arbitrary to its speakers. Some languages have far more classes than two or three, grouping by shape, animacy or edibility. Historically the categories grew out of older distinctions between animate and inanimate, and children learning a gendered language absorb the classes long before they can state a rule.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.