This word is very rarely used vocatively. It occurs in Boucicault’s nineteenth-century comedy London Assurance, addressed by Mr Spanker to Lady Gay. It is clearly meant to be a slightly more insulting term than ‘woman’, and is...

The female of the species is more deadly than the male....

Female (♀) is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces ova (egg cells). The ova are defined as the larger gametes in a heterogamous reproduction system, while the smaller, usually motile gamete, the spermatozoon is produced by...