Od nazwy żeńskiej do feminatywum. Z dziejów kategorii słowotwórczej i jej nazewnictwa

The article presents the history of the use of the term feminativum in Polish linguistic literature and in the general language. Moreover, it discusses the issue of isolating the word-formation category of feminine names in old grammars, as well as its contemporary definitions. The study used manual and automated (corpus-assisted) data extraction. The author posits that it was Piotr Statorius-Stojeński who distinguished the category of female names in his grammar of the Polish language for foreigners published in Latin in 1568. The author also determined that the term feminativum was propagated by Bogusław Kreja, who was the first to use it in his 1964 article. Although the term appeared only occasionally in linguistic publications in the second half of the 20th century, it came to be used regularly as a synonym for the term feminine names at the turn of the 2010s and 2020s. However, the inclusion of feminativum on the list of words in the Polish Word of the Year 2019 competition may have contributed to its popularity across the media.