or social gender of the noun's referent, particularly in the case of nouns denoting people (and sometimes animals), though with exceptions (the feminine French noun personne can refer to a male or a female person).

In Modern English, even common nouns like hen and princess and proper nouns like Alicia do not have grammatical gender (their femininity has no relevance in syntax), though they denote persons or animals of a specific sex. The gender of a pronoun must be appropriate for the item referred