Word.ws English Dictionary

fem

/fɛm/

fem noun: synonym of femme.

Noun (1)

fem (plural fems)

  1. (uncommon) Synonym of femme.
    • Oral history gave them an opportunity to share their vision of the world across generations, while giving us a chance to imagine the pleasure and pain of daily life for butches and fems in an earlier period.2014, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, Routledge, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    femme
    Antonyms:
    butch
  2. (colloquial, derogatory, sometimes) A feminine or effeminate person.
    • Versatile, but love to bottom … No divas or fems. Not homophobic at all, just my personal preference.2014, D Shuckerow, Take off your masc: The hegemonic gay male's gender performance on Grindr, quoting someone on Grindr
    • [...] chasers looking for silver daddies, exec types for college jocks, straights for gays, fems for mascs, smooths for hairies, huskies for slims, blacks for Latinos, whites for Asians, straights for gays, white collars for blue collars, ...2018, Luis Menéndez-Antuña, Thinking Sex with the Great Whore: Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation, Routledge, →ISBN

Adjective

fem (comparative more fem, superlative most fem)

  1. (colloquial) Feminine, effeminate.
    Antonyms:
    masc
  2. Synonym of femme.
    • Dozens of queers, including female to male/male to female transsexuals, leathers, bears and bisexuals, butch and fem lesbians, […]2007, Cameron McCarthy, Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 79
    Synonyms:
    femme
    Antonyms:
    butch

Noun (2) capitalized: FEM

FEM (countable and uncountable, plural FEMs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism, microscopy) Initialism of field emission microscopy.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of front end module.
  3. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of finite element method.

Proper noun capitalized: FEM

FEM

  1. (Philippine, abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Ferdinand Marcos, 9th President of the Philippines.
    Synonyms:
    FEA

Synonyms of fem

Antonyms

Forms of fem

Noun
pluralfems
pluralFEMs
Adjective
comparativemore fem
superlativemost fem

Plural of fem: fems

Origin of fem

Clipping of feminine.

Words formed from fem

Words that rhyme with fem

22 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about fem

What does fem mean?
Fem means synonym of femme.
What part of speech is fem?
Fem can be a noun, an adjective or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce fem?
Fem is pronounced /fɛm/.
What is the plural of fem?
The plural of fem is fems.

Words near fem in the dictionary

  1. felwoort
  2. felwoorts
  3. felwort
  4. felworts
  5. felypressin
  6. fem
  7. fem lib
  8. Fem&M's
  9. fem-
  10. fem.
  11. FEMA

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fem (page history and authors); FEM (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-fem.ogg.

Cite this entry: “fem.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fem. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.