gender-neutral words we lack in English

[darthfox]

So it's interesting to me that although we mostly don't have grammatical gender in English, we do have some words with inherent gender but no neutral alternative (which other gendered words do have). Viz

Comments

[sneezer222]

heifer and bull for baby calves. Calf is gender neutral

[ellinor]

It's interesting about cattle. For a couple of these, it's hard to know whether the male variant also serves as a gender neutral indicator of species. Like dog or mule. But cow--the female variant--has become the gender neutral singular for many casual English speakers. I'm not saying it's technically correct, just interesting that in that one case the female has become the default.

I wonder if that has to do with usefulness. I have the sense that when it comes to cattle, the female is useful for more purposes than the male, (because x plus milk) so people will assume that a bovine creature of indeterminate gender is a cow. Although of course this all may just betray my ignorance about the usefulness of bulls.

[angevin2]

For family terms there's also husband/wife/spouse. I've seen people on the internet use "nibling" as the gender-neutral version of niece/nephew but I don't think it's that widely known.

[jacquez]

Nibling is attested from 1989, iirc. I don't recall when I learned it, but I and all my sibs have used it for over a decade. The great thing about it, as a neologism, is that many native English speakers will instantly intuit its meaning upon seeing or hearing it.

eta: according to wiktionary (not the world's most trustworthy source I think you will agree:
"Coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in 1951[1] from nephew/niece by analogy with sibling."

[jacquez]

I'm a little weirded out by how many animal terms I know.

Cow, bull or steer (castrated male), ___
heifer, bull calf, calf (but even that is technically not exactly right, mostly we just use "calf" and "heifer" means "a cow that has not given birth" so technically you could have an ancient heifer)

"hog" is gender-neutral; the male is "boar". a castrated male is a "barrow".

speaking of steers and barrows, we also have "wether" for a castrated male sheep, and "gelding" for castrated male horse. apparently we think of those as separate genders or sexes in some way, but don't do so with dogs/cats?

queen, tom, cat
jenny, jack, donkey/ass/mule
vixen, dog, fox

hen, cock, bird/fowl are not universal. or at least, they do not apply to some common waterfowl:

goose, gander, goose
duck, drake, duck

I think might be onto something with the more useful version of a domesticated animal sometimes being the default name, because ducks and female geese are way more useful than male ones. This doesn't explain chickens, though, where the name