@sempervirenx @candle That's funny, because 'épicène' in grammar means precisely this for nouns - and its opposite for animal names: one word, with one given gender, used to designate animals of both sexes.

http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/%C3%A9pic%C3%A8ne

There ARE a few words in French that can be of either gender, but very few (the only one that comes to mind is afternoon, un/une après-midi) - and most of them take on different meanings (un espace is 'a space', UNE espace is exclusively the typographic element) or different uses & nuances ("amour", love, can be made feminine but only in plural form, that's an artifact of poetry...)