What is "noun class"

n. (context linguistics English) A grammatical category similar to gender in which nouns may be organised according to meaning, such as sex, animacy or shape. This is a prominent feature of some of the world's languages, notably the Bantu language family.

In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term " grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each (see below). Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.