Open English Wordnet
Nouns
(n)inanimacy(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."”