DictionaryAI

sexuality

noun
USsek-shoo-AL-uh-tee/sɛk.ʃuˈæ.lə.ti/UKsek-shoo-AL-i-tee/sɛk.ʃuːˈæ.lɪ.ti/

5 meanings of sexuality

Practice

  1. 1
    noununcountable
    A person's sexual orientation, whether their romantic or sexual attraction is toward men, women, both or neither.

    Researchers have long debated how much of a person's sexuality is shaped by genetics.

    He never felt the need to put a label on his sexuality.

    Similarorientation

    Note

    The sense in which sexuality can be disclosed or kept hidden: a prospective gay adoptive father "chose not to disclose his sexuality" to a caseworker. Careful writing keeps it apart from gender identity. Sue Westwood's Ageing, Gender and Sexuality (2016) speaks of ambivalence "about both his sexuality and his gender identity" as two separate things. When gender itself is meant, the word has moved over to the "gender" meaning.

  2. 2
    noununcountable
    Sexual activity, or a person's concern with and interest in sexual activity.

    The novel explores the protagonist's awakening sexuality during her college years.

    Advertisers often use sexuality to sell everything from cars to perfume.

    Similarsex, eroticism

    Note

    Here sexuality is something a person has, expresses and develops. People express their sexuality, adolescents are fascinated by a burgeoning sexuality, and people in recovery work on their sexuality. It usually comes with a possessive or a describing word in front, as in her sexuality, adolescent sexuality or anal sexuality. The plural turns up in clinical and psychoanalytic writing for the many forms such desire takes.

  3. 3
    noununcountable
    The quality or condition of being sexual; the aspects of life characterized or distinguished by sex.

    Sexuality pervades the imagery of the poem, from its opening stanza onward.

    Anthropologists study how different cultures understand and regulate human sexuality.

    Similareroticism

    Note

    The broadest sense, and the one biologists use. Fungi and insects can pass from sexuality to asexuality, and there the word simply means reproducing by sex. In the humanities it widens to everything sexual in a culture, and in that use it readily takes a plural, as in Signe Arnfred's "Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa" (2005). English borrowed the word from New Latin sexuālitās.

  4. 4
    noununcountable
    A person's sexual identity or gender, such as being male or female.

    Nineteenth-century parish registers recorded each child's sexuality, male or female, beside the date of birth.

    The biography notes that the novelist concealed her sexuality by publishing under a man's name.

    Similarsex, gender

  5. 5
    noununcountable
    Sexual potency; the physical capacity or power to engage in sexual activity.

    Advertisements for the tonic claimed it could restore a man's fading sexuality.

    Doctors warned him that the treatment might permanently impair his sexuality.

    Similarpotency, virility

    Oppositeimpotence

Practice

Can you tell the meanings of sexuality apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.

Origin

Borrowed from New Latin "sexuālitās".