'gender-inclusive' originates from modern English, combining the word 'gender' and the adjective 'inclusive'; 'gender' ultimately comes from Old French 'gendre' and Latin 'genus', and 'inclusive' comes from Latin 'includere' where the prefix 'in-' meant 'in' and the root 'claudere' meant 'to shut or close'.

'gender' developed from Old French 'gendre' (from Latin 'genus') into Middle English 'gendre/genre' and later became 'gender' in modern English, with a 20th-century extension from grammatical categories to social categories of identity; 'inclusive' came from Latin 'includere' to Late Latin 'inclusus', through Old French and Middle English forms into modern English 'inclusive', and combining the two produced the compound 'gender-inclusive' in recent usage.

Initially, 'gender' primarily referred to grammatical class ('kind' or 'type'), but over time it shifted to commonly denote social and identity categories of people; 'inclusive' originally had a physical sense of 'shut in' or 'enclosed' and then developed to mean 'including' or 'not excluding', so 'gender-inclusive' now means 'not excluding on the basis of gender'.