Masculine and Feminine Nouns
One of the hardest things for people to get used to when learning Spanish is the idea that nouns (people, places, animals, things, ideas, and feelings) have a gender (male, female). There is always a question of "How can a table be feminine?" and "How can a book be masculine?" This doesn’t mean that the table or the book is physically feminine or masculine, but in a grammatical sense, the ending is. Why is gender so important in Spanish? Well, if a noun is masculine, then its descriptive adjectives and articles will also need to be masculine. In order to describe something accurately, an adjective must match a noun in both gender and number. For example:
Knowing the gender of a noun allows you to describe it using adjectives correctly and also use the correct articles when you have to. By far, the best way to determine the gender of a noun is to look it up in a dictionary. If you don't have a dictionary available, there are a few general observations you can use below, but these are not rules! They are just clues for when you don't have a dictionary. So let’s talk about some general ways to recognize if a noun is masculine or feminine.
Most masculine nouns end in -o. Ending in an -o can indicate that a person or animal is male, or just an object, idea, etc. that is grammatically masculine.
Common Masculine Noun that End in -O
For All Those Masculine Nouns that Don't End in -O...
If it ends in -e, an accented vowel (-á, -é, -í, -ó, -ú), -ma, or a consonant other than -d, -z, or -ión, it's also masculine.
|-e||el perfume , el estante , el maquillaje|
|accented vowel||el colibrí , el ají , el ñandú|
|consonant (except -d, -z, and -ión)||el árbol , el rumor , el cojín|
|-ma||el programa , el drama , el idioma|
And the exceptions...
These nouns may look like they have a masculine ending, but they are actually feminine. No rules here, just memorization.
|-o||-e||consonants that aren't -d nor -z|
Most feminine nouns end in -a. Ending in an -a indicates that a person or animal is female or that an object, idea, etc. is grammatically feminine.
Common Feminine Nouns that End in -A
For All Those Feminine Nouns That Don't End in -A...
If it ends in -d, -z, or ión, it's also feminine.
|-d||la felicidad , la virtud , la salud|
|-z||la paz , la nariz , la luz|
|-ión||la canción , la religión , la irritación|
And the exceptions...
These nouns look like they have feminine endings, but are grammatically masculine. Memorize these!
Borrowing From Greek!
A lot of nouns that end in -ma, -pa, and -ta are masculine because they are Greek in origin.