a word's gender decides how to say a word. for example, the german word for "man" is masculine ("der mann"), the word for "woman" is feminine ("die frau"), and the word for "girl" is neuter ("das mädchen"). the gender of a word may not have connection with its biological sex in certain languages; it is instead a way to organize words grammatically. many indo-european languages, like russian, german, and latin, still have all three genders.