Female is also used as a noun meaning "a female organism", though describing women as females is often considered disparaging, as it makes no distinction between animals and humans. It is not etymologically related to the word male, but in the late 14th century the English spelling was altered to parallel that of male. The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning " woman". "fæmnan," an Old English word for 'female' In humans, the word female can also be used to refer to gender. Female characteristics vary between different species with some species having pronounced secondary female sex characteristics, such as the presence of pronounced mammary glands in mammals. Most female mammals, including female humans, have two X chromosomes. In species that have males and females, sex-determination may be based on either sex chromosomes, or environmental conditions. The exact mechanism of female gamete evolution remains unknown. Females and males are results of the anisogamous reproduction system, wherein gametes are of different sizes, unlike isogamy where they are the same size. It also stands for the planet Venus and is the alchemical symbol for copper.įemale ( symbol: ♀) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction. The symbol of the Roman goddess Venus is used to represent the female sex in biology.
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