1. (linguistics) The characteristic of a noun, in some languages, that is dependent on its unliving or non-sentient nature; this characteristic affects grammatical features (it can modify verbs used with the noun, affect the noun's declension etc.)
   "In other words, the inanimacy of a head noun like ‘evidence’ appeared not to penetrate the syntactic analysis of the verb ‘examined’"

Type of: grammatical category, syntactic category