Noun Genders (01) Masculine and Feminine

Grammar is the blueprint of language!

 An element of Spanish grammar that can seem completely new is that nouns have genders. (A noun, if you remember, is a word for a person, place, thing or idea.) It’s a little easier to imagine gendered words when you think of people or animals. These already have genders: boy, girl, cow, bull, ewe, buck.

In Spanish, this is taken a step further. Even words for animate objects, ideas, or places have a genders. The qualities of the place or the thing don’t have anything to do with what gender it has. Rather,  it’s simply a grammar aspect; it is used to add structure to the language as we’ll see later with adjectives and articles..

How do you know what gender a word has? Here are some guidelines.

• Masculine nouns are LONERS. That is, if they end in -l, -o, -n, -e, -r, or -s, there’s a good chance it’s masculine.
• Most feminine nouns end in -a, -dad, -ion, or -z.

Like many things in grammar, these are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. There are exceptions (which we will explore later.) For 80% of new words you encounter, these guidelines won’t lead you wrong. Particularly, the LONERS acronym really helped me when I began learning Spanish. If the noun you’re looking at doesn't end in LONERS, odds are it’s feminine.