When describing males, you would use blond: He is blond. You can add an E to blond when you describe females: She is blonde. This rare persistence of French forms can be confusing for some because English doesn't usually change the endings of adjectives to reflect gender.
Blond and blonde are two spellings of the same word. If you want to follow the traditional spelling convention, use blonde for girls and women, and blond for boys and men.
In clear terms, “blond” is an adjective used for masculine nouns (i.e. the blond boy) while “blonde” is only attributed to female nouns (i.e. the girl is blonde.)
How is blonde different from blond? Blonde and blond essentially mean the same thing. It's just that in French, blond is the masculine form, both as a noun and adjective; adding the E makes it feminine.
There are three (fairly) common words with gendered spellings in English: Blond (masculine) and blonde (feminine) Fiancé (masculine) and fiancée (feminine)
◊ This word usually refers to a woman or a girl and is spelled brunette. When it refers to a man or a boy, it is usually spelled brunet.
Basically, gender in languages is just one way of breaking up nouns into classes. In fact, according to some linguists, “grammatical gender” and “noun class” are the same thing. It's an inheritance from our distant past. Researchers believe that Proto-Indo-European had two genders: animate and inanimate.
Both Old English and Old Norse had gender, but sometimes their genders contradicted each other. In order to simplify communication, gendered nouns simply disappeared. Of course, gender did not disappear entirely. We still have gendered pronouns in English: he, she and it.
The urge to be blonde may also be driven by deep evolutionary history beginning many millennia ago when light shades first appeared on women's manes, allowing them to turn the heads of potential mates. "The more common a hair color becomes, the less often it is preferred," Frost said. "It's a kind of novelty effect.
The different spellings of the adjective reflect a discrepancy in gender. According to Dictionary.com, "blonde" is technically supposed to be used when describing a fair-haired females, while the word "blond" may be used to more accurately describe a fair-haired male.
Adult men with blond hair are rare because blond hair is a recessive trait that tends to fade or darken with age.
Before you ask, yes, men can dye their hair and plenty more do than you'd probably assume.
This sounds a little strange to English speakers because English is not a gendered language. So, technically, blond refers to a man with light-colored hair, while blonde refers to a woman with light-colored hair.
To describe a male or his hair color, use blond. He is a blond. He has blond hair. To describe a female or her hair color, use blonde. She is a blonde.
According to Papanikolas, blondeness isn't a simple issue. Anyone can be a variation of blonde, but not everyone can be a specific shade of blonde... Your starting level will dictate what is possible. Darker hair will need to accept the reality of being a caramel-honey blonde.
English Slang Pronunciation Video:
Anyway, a blonde moment is an insult that means to do something really, really stupid. In Western culture, blonde women have a reputation for acting stupid. So to have a blonde moment means to act like a blonde, or do something really dumb.
' Men's preference for blondes may be due to evolutionary reasons. In cavemen times, hair colour was seen as a good way to pick a potential partner. Because our hair tends to darken with age, women with naturally lighter hair are younger and so were seen to be more fertile.
Numerous studies point to brunette hair being more attractive. Take this 2011 study from dating app Badoo, for example. A couple of thousand UK men were polled and 33.1% of them revealed they found brunettes more attractive than blondes.
The results revealed that, compared to women with dark hair, men found light-haired ladies more attractive overall, but more specifically, perceived them as younger and healthier. However, there is one downfall of blondes, apparently — they were also seen as more promiscuous, which is generally not a good thing.
Decline of grammatical gender
The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system.
There are some languages that have no gender! Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and many other languages don't categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.
Gender is used to tell whether a noun is male or female. There are four types of genders into which nouns are classified as follows: masculine, feminine, neuter, and common.
The short answer to why French has gender is because Latin had gender, and French is descended from Latin.
"In Latin there is a clear biological basis for the gender system. The noun for a male animal would typically be masculine, a female animal would be feminine, and the rest would typically be neuter. And then it gets generalized and non-animate nouns also get masculine or feminine gender."