What does effeminize mean?
Effeminize is a transitive verb meaning to make a man or boy effeminate — that is, to cause him to display qualities conventionally coded as feminine, such as delicacy, softness, or vanity. By extension it can describe rendering a whole culture, institution, or style less ruggedly masculine. The word derives from the Latin effeminare, built on femina, meaning woman, and entered English in an early modern era obsessed with the supposed dangers of luxury and idleness for male character. Crucially, it is not a neutral counterpart to "feminize": where feminize simply describes adding feminine attributes, effeminize passes judgment, implying decline, weakness, or degeneration from a proper masculine standard. Because that premise is now widely rejected, the verb survives mainly in historical prose, literary criticism, and discussions of gendered rhetoric rather than in everyday speech. Writers today encounter it most often when quoting polemicists who worried that comfort, fashion, or foreign influence would unman a nation's youth.
verbTo make a man or boy effeminate; to cause someone or something to take on characteristics regarded as feminine.
- To make a man or boy effeminate; to strip someone perceived as masculine of his manly qualities.
- More broadly, to imbue anything (a style, an institution, a culture) with traits stereotypically considered feminine, usually with disapproval.
"Critics of the era's luxury complained that soft living would effeminize the young men of the ruling class."
"Victorian moralists feared that boarding schools had grown so comfortable they would effeminize the empire's future officers."
"The pamphlet attacked the new fashion for silk stockings, claiming it would effeminize an entire generation."
Built from the same Latin root as "female" — the word literally accuses its target of being made womanish.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of effeminize
Effeminize comes from the Latin effeminare, "to make womanish," formed from ex- ("out of") plus femina ("woman"), the same noun that gives English "female" and "feminine." The Latin root passed into English chiefly through the adjective "effeminate," attested from late Middle English, and the verb was later derived from it using the Latinate -ize suffix common in early modern English coinages. Its closest siblings are "effeminate" and "effeminacy," all sharing the feminine-root stem rather than deriving from one another.
Related word forms
How effeminize is actually used
The word is rare and almost always carries a pejorative, prescriptive charge: it assumes that feminine traits in a man are a loss or a failing. Modern usage is therefore largely confined to historical writing about past attitudes, or to quoting or critiquing such attitudes. Speakers who want a neutral term for giving something feminine qualities should prefer "feminize".
Easily confused with effeminize
"Feminize" neutrally means to give feminine qualities to anyone or anything (including institutions or language), while "effeminize" specifically means to make a male seem unmanly and typically carries a negative judgment.