English has a sizable and highly frequent amount of paired nouns that are equivalent in meaning except for normative gender value. For lexical gender nouns, this distinction is not due to a suffix. These nouns have different roots or stems and their normative gender value is due to their meaning, as reinforced by centuries of common usage. The pairs uncle and aunt, as well as nephew and niece, have no prescriptive gender-neutral alternatives. The forms pibling and nibling (adapted from sibling) have been proposed for these pairs.

Note: Some of these roots may be compounded, as in man/woman (e.g. mailman/mailwoman, congressman/ congresswoman), boy/girl (e.g. boyfriend/girlfriend), and wife (e.g. housewife). Many of these words can be neutralized using other resources in the language, for instance: mail carrier, congress member, salesperson, partner/significant other, firefighter, and police officer. At least one compounded form is inherited from Italian: primadonna, from donna 'woman'.

Many pairs of English nouns that are distinguished by normative gender have morphological distinctions, which in the case of English means that they feature gendered suffixes, most of which are inherited from other languages, like Old French (e.g. chanteur/chanteuse 'singer'), Spanish (e.g. Latino/Latina, Filipino/ Filipina), Italian (e.g. diva, ballerina), and one set from Latin that also encodes grammatical number (e.g. alumnus/alumna/alumni/alumnae). These suffixes number at least nine:

-ess, -ette, -euse,  -ix, -ine, -enne, -a,    -e, and -ina.

Note: Especially in the U.S. context, some normatively masculine forms have been embraced as gender-neutral alternatives, especially actor. Other pairs are neutralized using various resources in the language: flight attendant (for steward/stewardess), server (for waiter/waitress), and ballet dancer (for ballerina). 

Honorifics in English are prominent and frequent, in addition to being one of only a few features of gender in the language. Marital status is distinguished in the pair Mrs. (for a married woman) and Miss (for an unmarried woman), for which Ms. (pronounced miz [mɪz]) was a title proposed by feminists that collapses this marital distinction and was rapidly accepted in the 20th century. The honorific Mx. (pronounced mix [mɪks]) is now used for the purposes of gender-neutrality or for the expression of specifically nonbinary identities.