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Gender of Nouns in Spanish

example of Spanish gender

In Spanish, there are 2 types of nouns:

The grammatical gender of a noun has implications in the other words of the sentence. Adjectives, pronouns and determiners must have the same gender of the noun to which they refer.

Masculine rules

In most cases, we can tell if a noun is feminine or masculine by looking at its ending.

Next, we will look at the most common rules for the masculine gender.

Masculine endings

Often, we can tell whether a noun is masculine if it ends in:

Masculine
Ending
ExampleMeaning
-oel perrothe dog
-eel puentethe bridge
[consonant]*el lápizthe pencil

NOTE: usually when a word ends in a consonant is masculine but not endings "-ión" and "-d" , which are often feminine.

Groups of masculine words

Some groups of words are always masculine:

Feminine rules

Often, we can tell whether a noun is feminine if it ends in:

Feminine
Ending
ExampleMeaning
-ala mesathe table
-del puentethe bridge
-iónla direcciónthe address

Unfortunately, there are many exceptions, some of the them:

el idioma
the language

el policía
the policeman

Forming Feminine Nouns

Oft, the construction of the feminine noun is easy if we know the masculine noun. There are a few simple rules:

But sometimes we can not form the feminine that easily. Although the root of the word does not change, the ending is completely different:

El actor --> La actriz
Actor --> Actress

El gallo --> La gallina
Rooster --> Hen

In other cases, the feminine word is completely different:

El hombre --> La mujer
The man --> The woman

El caballo --> La yegua
The horse --> The mare

El toro --> La vaca
The bull --> The cow

Endings for both genders

There are endings that are used for both genders. They are:

In these cases, we would determine the gender from its corresponding article.

el estilista --> la estilista
The stylist (male) --> The stylist (female)

Other cases

Animal names are usually only masculine or only femenine and used for both genders. The actual sex is determined by adding "macho" (male) or "hembra" (female) after the noun.

here some Masculine animals:

Masculine
Noun
Meaning
el águilathe aegle
el cisnethe swan
el pájarothe bird

And some feminine animals:

Feminine
Animals
Meaning
la abejathe bee
la arañathe spider
la ballenathe whale

Masculine examples:

el águila macho - el águila hembra
the male eagle, the female eagle

el gorila macho - el gorila hembra
the male gorilla – the female gorilla

Feminine examples:

la jirafa macho - la jirafa hembra
the male giraffe – the female giraffe

la tortuga macho - la tortuga hembra
the male turtle – the female turtle