by Olly RichardsIf you're learning French, then you'll know that French word gender is one of the most dreaded features of the language and the stuff of nightmares for learners everywhere.
After all, how is it possible to remember whether each and every individual noun in the whole French language is masculine or feminine?
However, it’s nothing to be scared of, and once you get started, it’s not as difficult as you might imagine – so to give you some advice about the best ways to tackle it, here’s my guide to French word gender.
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What Is French Word Gender?
Most people probably have an idea about what gender means when talking about languages, but let’s start right at the beginning.
At the most basic level, grammatical gender is the division of nouns into classes. French has two genders, masculine and feminine, while German has three, masculine, feminine and neuter – and some languages have even more than this!
The important thing to remember, however, is that grammatical gender isn’t the same as “natural” gender.
Most nouns with a natural feminine meaning are feminine and most with a natural masculine meaning are masculine – femme (woman) is feminine, and homme (man) is masculine, which makes sense. However, it doesn’t always work like this.
Many nouns have no natural gender, but they still have a grammatical gender, and this often seems entirely arbitrary. For example, table (table) is feminine, but bureau (desk or office) is masculine. Don’t ask why.
Furthermore, French word gender can sometimes seem quite illogical or counterintuitive – a great example of this is the word masculinité (masculinity), which is a feminine noun in French!
Why Does French Have Gender?
The short answer to why French has gender is because Latin had gender, and French is descended from Latin.
However, that begs the question, why did Latin have gender?
The answer to this can be traced right back to a theoretical ancient language called Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of all the Romance languages, the Germanic languages, the Slavic languages, many of the languages of northern India such as Hindi and quite a few others.
But why did Proto-Indo-European have gender? Nobody really knows.
How Does Gender Affect French?
Academic questions like this may be fascinating, but more pertinent to someone learning French is how it affects the language.
The most obvious effect is that the gender of a noun determines which French article you use with it – whether you use le or la for “the” and un or une for “a”.
Furthermore, due to rules of agreement, grammatical gender also requires French pronouns and French adjectives to change so they “agree” with the gender of the noun they are being used with. We’ll look at this in a bit more detail later in the post.
Is Having Gender Useful?
Some people might think this system is unnecessarily complicated and serves no purpose other than making French harder to learn.
However, sometimes having different genders can make a sentence clearer. For example, foi (faith) is feminine and foie (liver) is masculine – but the two nouns sound exactly the same.
But because they have different genders, we can easily distinguish between sentences like j’ai perdu ma foi and j’ai perdu mon foie.
When spoken, these sentences sound the same apart from the use of the masculine or feminine article – but they have quite different meanings.
The first version means “I’ve lost my faith”, which is reasonable and easy to understand – but the second means “I’ve lost my liver”, which would be altogether more disturbing.
This is just one example, but in any case, even if you’re not convinced, that’s too bad.
French has gender, so if you want to speak French, you’re just going to have to get to grips with it. So now let’s have a look at how to determine the grammatical gender of nouns in French.
The Gender Of Nouns In French
First, the bad news.
In French, it’s usually impossible to guess the gender of a noun just by looking at it, which means you have to learn the gender of every noun individually.
However, there’s some good news too. There are some common endings that will help you guess the gender of a noun with more than a 50/50 chance of being correct.
But now for some more bad news – unfortunately, there are almost always exceptions that can catch you out, so you still have to remember them all to be sure.
Some Useful Endings To Remember
So which endings can help you guess a noun’s gender? Let’s have a look.
Nouns Ending In Consonants: Usually Masculine
Many nouns whose singular form ends in a consonant are masculine.
However, there are also many exceptions, often nouns ending in -n, -r, -s, -t and -x (i.e., nouns ending in these consonants are usually masculine, but many of the exceptions end in these letters).
This is not a hard and fast rule, but at least it will help you to guess if you are not sure.
Examples:
- un document (a document)
- un calendrier (a calendar)
- le soleil (the sun)
- un scorpion (a scorpion)
Exceptions:
- une nuit (a night)
- la mer (the sea)
Nouns Ending In -on: Usually Masculine
Nouns ending in -on are usually masculine.
Examples:
- un poisson (a fish)
- un cordon (a cord)
Exception:
- une chanson (a song)
Nouns ending in -aison, -sion, -tion and -xion: usually feminine
Although nouns ending in -on are usually masculine, those ending in -aison, -sion, -tion and -xion are almost always feminine.
This is one of the more reliable rules to remember since there are very few exceptions.
Examples:
- une décision (a decision)
- une connexion (a connection)
Exception:
- un bastion (a bastion)
Nouns Ending In -é: Usually Masculine
A reasonable guide if in doubt, but there are plenty of exceptions, often in abstract nouns.
Examples:
- un café (a coffee, a café)
- un marché (a market)
Exceptions:
- une clé (a key)
- la masculinité (masculinity)
- l’obscurité (darkness, obscurity)
Nouns Ending In -ai, -oi, -i And -ou: Usually Masculine
Another useful rule – but pay attention to exceptions.
Examples:
- un essai (an attempt)
- un niveau (a level)
- le roi (the king)
- un pari (a bet)
- un genou (a knee)
Exceptions:
- une loi (a law)
- une paroi (a wall)
Nouns Ending In –eau: Usually Masculine
Usually true, but there are still exceptions.
Examples:
- un bateau (a boat)
- un corbeau (a crow, raven)
Exceptions:
- l’eau (water)
- la peau (skin)
Nouns Ending In -e: Usually Feminine
This ‘rule’ is very approximative since there are so many exceptions. However, it still gives you a better chance than 50% of guessing right if you don’t know the correct gender.
Beware of the many exceptions – the last one, squelette, is a word that most people would probably guess was feminine, for example.
Examples:
- une place (a seat, a place, a parking space)
- la race (race, breed)
Exceptions:
- un téléphone (a telephone)
- un portable (a mobile (telephone))
- le monde (the world)
- un kilomètre (a kilometre)
- un squelette (a skeleton)
Nouns Ending In -isme, -ède, -ège, -ème: Usually Masculine
Nouns ending in -isme are always masculine, and those ending in -ède, -ège, -ème are usually masculine.
Examples:
- un remède (a remedy)
- le système (the system)
- un piège (a trap)
Exception:
- la crème (cream)
Nouns Ending In -age: Usually Masculine
This rule is usually true, but some of the exceptions are common words, so it’s a good idea to remember them.
Examples:
- un massage (a massage)
- un stage (an internship)
- un garage (a garage)
Exceptions:
- une page (a page)
- une plage (a beach)
- une cage (a cage)
- une image (a picture, image)
Some Other Rules To Be Aware Of
Most nouns in French have an arbitrary grammatical gender, but there are a few other rules to note too.
Nouns That Can Be Masculine Or Feminine But Don’t Change
Some nouns, usually ones that refer to people, can be either masculine or feminine. However, the noun itself doesn’t change, only the article.
Examples:
- un/une adulte (an adult)
- un/une dentiste (a dentist)
- un/une enfant (a child)
Nouns With Masculine And Feminine Forms
Many nouns also exist that change depending on whether they refer to a male or a female.
The most common way this happens is to add an -e to the masculine form, which may or may not change the pronunciation.
Examples:
- un ami/une amie (a friend (no pronunciation change))
- un avocat/une avocate (a lawyer (different pronunciation))
Masculine nouns ending in -ien, -on, -an, -in or -ain add -e or -ne, changing the pronunciation.
Examples:
- un chien => une chienne
- a dog => a bitch
- un voisin => une voisine
- a neighbour
Other nouns add -esse, a transformation that is sometimes mirrored in English.
Examples:
- un prince => une princesse
- a prince => a princess
- un hôte => une hôtesse
- a host => a hostess
Nouns ending in -eur follow one of two patterns – they either change to -euse or -rice in the feminine form.
Examples:
- un chanteur => une chanteuse
- a singer
- un directeur => une directrice
- a director
Irregular changes
Some nouns have feminine forms that don’t follow a regular pattern.
Examples:
- un homme => une femme
- a man => a woman
- un fils => une fille
- a son => a daughter
- un garçon => une fille
- a boy => a girl
Nouns With Different Meanings Depending On Their Gender
A handful of nouns have both masculine and feminine forms, and the meaning changes depending on the gender.
Examples:
- un livre (a book)
- une livre (a pound (the weight or the British currency))
- un merci (a thank you)
- la merci (mercy)
How Does Gender Affect Sentences In French?
So we’ve seen that French word gender affects the choice of article – whether you use le or la, un or une – but what else does it affect?
This is a big topic, but let’s have a brief look at some of the basics to give you an idea.
The gender of a noun can cause the pronoun or French possessive adjective used with it to change.
For example, the word for “my” in French has two singular forms, mon and ma – the first is used with masculine nouns and the second with feminine nouns, like this:
- mon père (my father)
- ma mère (my mother)
Gender also determines which personal pronoun you use. For example, if the person or thing doing the action is masculine, you use il (he), but if the person or thing is feminine, you use elle (she).
For plurals, for a group that is all-male, you use ils (they), but for a group that is all-female, you use elles (they).
For a mixed group of males and females, you use ils. This is even true if the group has ten females and only one male. Unfortunately, French grammar makes no allowances for sexual equality!
Adjectives also change to agree with nouns they describe, for example:
- Un bain chaud (a hot bath)
- Une douche chaude (a hot shower)
Obviously, there’s far more to it than just this, and the concept of gender in French is so fundamental to the way the language works that it’s practically impossible to say anything without it.
What’s The Best Way To Learn French Word Gender?
We’ve established that all French nouns have gender, that you can’t reliably guess the gender without learning it and that you can’t really say much in French without knowing the gender of what you’re talking about – so how should you go about learning it?
The best advice is always to learn the gender with any new noun you meet.
If you write it down, never write the word alone – always write it with an article. And when you say the word aloud, always say the article with it.
This way, your brain will remember the word and the article together, and eventually, it will just sound weird saying it with the wrong article – much as it would for a native speaker.
And here’s another tip: try imagining ‘reasons’ for why a noun has a particular gender.
For example, you might remember that voiture (car), is feminine because women are better drivers than men.
It doesn’t matter how silly the reason is – the sillier or funnier the better because that only makes it more memorable.
Practice Really Does Make Perfect
With French word gender, like much else in language learning, practice really does make perfect.
The more you practise speaking French and the more you hear French being spoken, you more you will instinctively remember the gender of each noun.
Then, before you know it, confusing the gender of a noun will seem as unnatural to you as it does to a native speaker.
The best way to get the immersion you need to master French word gender is to follow the rules of StoryLearning® and read stories in French.
As you read books in French at your level, you'll quickly pick up the gender of the most important nouns. And you'll soon start using them with ease!
