Eggcorn Forum

Cute Genderfluid Names for your future Heir – [¶] Androgenous names that starts with letter H. Hampton. This English origin name means ‘one who lives in Hampton.’

Results from the spouse/personal factors indicate that men who had feminine or androgenous characteristics, that allowed them to be more […]

They enter kindergarten with gross- and fine-motor skills only partially developed and leave the twelfth grade with them fully developed. They enter kindergarten with many androgenous characteristics and leave the twelfth grade thoroughly differentiated as males and females (Berger, 1986).

Androgyny is the state of indeterminate gender, or characteristics of gender. Androgenous traits are those that either have no gender value, or have some aspects generally attributed to the opposite gender. Physiological androgyny, dealing with physical traits, is distinct from behavioral androgyny which deals with personal and social anomalies in gender. [Wikipedia definition]

I’m a collection of masculine, feminine and androgenous traits that shift. If I’m perceived as a man, I’m okay with that.

The pronunciation difference between androgenous and androgynous is nil in many dialects, and perception of the components of the intended word is probably low at best for most speakers. I.e. they do not perceive andr- ‘male’ and gyn- ‘female’ at all, and – ogenous is a fairly common complex suffix, even an academic or scientific-looking one, that they probably think fits, so they spell the word that way. I think a lot of moderns may associate andr- with words like android rather than anything specifically male, so the idea of non-humanity or non-normal humanity (while preserving the appearance of humanity) may be at work. The fact that Andromeda was definitely female rather than male may (or may not) also be a confusing factor.
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And of course spelling errors of miscellaneous motivation are likely sources for the word, especially in cases like the Wikipedia entry, where the missspelling is surrounded by correctly-spelled versions of the same word.
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An old meaning of androgenous was ‘producing exclusively male offspring’. I guess Leah in Genesis was androgenous until she finally got her Dinah, and perhaps Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice was gynegenous? (I didn’t find that word on the Internet.) One might expect the word to also/instead mean ‘of the male type’, but I didn’t find it so used. Androgens (testosterone and the like) may be involved as well, though again one would expect that connection to produce the meaning ‘decidedly male’.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-10-14 18:17:14)