Definition of "effeminacy" [ef•fem•i•na•cy]

• The quality or condition of being effeminate. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "In his indignation at what he termed their effeminacy, he would swear that he would never take them to sea again "without having Fly-market on the forecastle, Covent-garden on the poop, and a cool spring from Canada in the maintop.""
• "These also recovered, and by the following morning all had passed the ordeal, save one, who having escaped so much longer than the rest, fancied himself entirely out of danger, and indiscreetly boasted of his better constitution, laughing at what he called the effeminacy of his companions."
• "His virtues, as well as the vices of Elagabalus, contracted a tincture of weakness and effeminacy from the soft climate of Syria, of which he was a native; though he blushed at his foreign origin, and listened with a vain complacency to the flattering genealogists, who derived his race from the ancient stock of Roman nobility."