Feminine or masculine, that is the question you often ask yourself as a French learner. After hours trying to figure out why “cheveux” (hair) is masculine and “chaise” (chair) feminine, you came to the inevitable conclusion: the gender of French nouns was randomly chosen by a bunch of sadistic linguists.
You may have heard that there is only one way to know the gender of a noun, to learn it by heart.
Luckily this is one of many myths about the French language, and you can actually know the gender of a French noun with more than 80% accuracy just by looking at its ending.
Contents
Why French genders matter
You can’t master French if you don’t master French genders. Luckily, the use of French genders is pretty straightforward, even if your language doesn’t use genders for nouns.
Before you discover how to easily know the gender of French nouns with 80% accuracy, you need to know that the gender has an influence on:
- The article you use before a noun
- Pronouns
- The ending of adjectives and verbs
You’ll discover how genders change these elements in the last section of this article, but before you do, here is how to easily know the gender of French words
How to know the gender of French nouns with 80% accuracy
Associate each gender with a vivid image
Your French teacher told you to do this, and this may be the only solution in some cases. But instead of simply learning each word and its gender by heart, it can be smart to associate each gender with an action in your brain.
You could imagine that masculine nouns fall into water while feminine nouns are eaten by a monster. Associating each noun with such a vivid image helps you remember its gender more easily.
The association needs to be personal, this must be something you will easily remember. For example, If you love to sing, you could sing each word with a different tone depending on its gender.
Guess the gender based on the word’s ending
According to a study by McGill University, a noun’s ending indicates its gender in 80% of cases . Based on this study, here is a list of typically masculine and typically feminine noun endings.
Nouns with these endings were found to be of the same gender in more than 90% of cases.
I don’t recommend you to learn these endings by heart since it would be extremely boring. Instead, bookmark this page and regularly look at this list.
After a while, you will see that you can intuitively guess the gender of a noun based on its ending.
I also created a simplified list that’s easier to remember. You’ll find it below this first list :).
Typically masculine noun endings (+90%)
- -an, -and, -ant, -ent, -in, -int, -om, -ond, -ont, -on (but not after s/c¸)
- -eau, -au, -aud, -aut, -o, -os, -ot
- -ai, -ais, -ait, -es, -et
- -ou, -out, -out, -oux
- -i, -il, -it, -is, -y
- -at, -as, -ois, -oit
- • -u, -us, -ut, -eu
- -er, -e´after C (C=t)
- -age, -ege, – ` eme, -ome/- ` ome, -aume, -isme
- -as, -is, -os, -us, -ex
- -it, -est
- -al, -el, -il, -ol, -eul, -all
- -if, -ef
- -ac, -ic, -oc, -uc
- -am, -um, -en
- -air, -er, -erf, -ert, -ar, -arc, -ars, -art, -our, -ours, -or, -ord, -ors, -ort, -ir, -oir, -eur
(if animate) - -ail, -eil, -euil, -ueil
- -ing
Typically feminine noun endings (+90%)
- -aie, -oue, -eue, -ion, -te, – ´ ee, -ie, -ue
- -asse, -ace, -esse, -ece, -aisse, -isse/-ice, -ousse, -ance, -anse, -ence, -once
- -enne, -onne, -une, -ine, -aine, -eine, -erne
- -ande, -ende, -onde, -ade, -ude, -arde, -orde
- -euse, -ouse, -ase, -aise, -ese, -oise, -ise, -yse, -ose, -use
- -ache, -iche, -eche, -oche, -uche, -ouche, -anche
- -ave, -eve, -ive
- -iere, -ure, -eure
- -ette, -ete, – ˆ ete, -atte, -otte, -oute, -orte, -ante, -ente, -inte, -onte
- -alle, -elle, -ille, -olle
- -aille, -eille, -ouille
- -appe, -ampe, -ombe
- • -igue
A simplified list of endings
A simplified list of endingsThe previous list has the advantage of being exhaustive, but as French Together reader Amosnliz notes in the comment section, you can learn a simplified, and shorter list.
While there is no precise data available, you can consider that you’ll be right 80% of the time if you use this simplified list.
Feminine noun endings
- The majority of words that end in -e or -ion.
- Except words ending in -age, -ege, -é, or -isme (these endings often indicate masculine words).
Masculine noun endings
Most words with other endings are masculine.
French gender rules explained
You now know how to easily identify the gender of French nouns. Now let’s see why knowing the gender of French words is so important.
Here is what changes based on genders:
Articles
In English, you always use “the”. In French, you have a masculine “the” (le) and a feminine “the” (la).
Similarly, you have a masculine “a” (un) and a feminine “a” (une).
Finally, while you say “some” in English. You need to make the distinction between “du” (masculine) and “de la” (feminine) in French.
Pronouns
Like in English, pronouns change depending on the subject’s gender.
He = il
she = elle
however, unlike English, there are two ways to say “they”.
Elles (feminine subject)
Ils (masculine subject)
Adjectives
French adjectives change based on the gender and number of the noun they modify. This means the adjective is either:
- Masculine singular
- Feminine singular
- Masculine plural
- Feminine plural
Let’s take several adjectives as examples. These are adjectives you can use to guess how other adjectives with similar endings will change.
Content (happy)
Masculine singular: content
Feminine singular: contente
Masculine plural: contents
Feminine plural: contentes
Fatigué (tired)
Masculine singular: fatigué
Feminine singular: fatiguée
Masculine plural: fatigués
Feminine plural: fatiguées
Bon (good)
Masculine singular: bon
Feminine singular: bonne
Masculine plural: bons
Feminine plural: bonnes
Read 13 common French mistakes that’ll make you feel awkward before you use it.
Triste (sad)
Masculine singular: triste
Feminine singular: triste
Masculine plural: tristes
Feminine plural: tristes
There are of course exceptions, but if you know these patterns, you’ll know how most adjectives change based on the gender of the noun they modify.
Verbs
The passé composé tense is the most striking example of the influence of genders and number on conjugation.
Je suis allé(e)
Tu es allé(e)
Il/elle est allé(e)
Nous sommes allé(e)s
Vous êtes allé(e)(s)
Ils/elles sont allé(e)s
As you can see, the verb changes based on the subject’s number and gender. This is also true for other compound tenses.
These differences are only noticeable in written French since the pronunciation remains the same.
If there is only one thing you should remember for this lesson, it’s that the majority of words ending in -e or -ion are feminine while words with other endings are mostly masculine. It’s not going to work all the time, but you’re much more likely to be right if you follow this rule than if you simply guess.
What about you? How do you determine the gender of new French nouns you encounter? Share your tips and experience in the comment section below this article!
Wait, so basically all feminine endings end in E, except for rare ocassions and masculine endings are the rest?
From rule above, maybe there is way to simplify it, all endings with ‘e’ are feminine +90%,
except endings :
-age, -ege, – ` eme, -ome/- ` ome, -aume, -isme
This way entire rule can be reduced to 7 masculine ending exceptions and we could say +90%
ending ‘e’ – feminine
ending anything but ‘e’ – masculine
Isn’t it the same as the simplified list I posted though? 🙂
Feminine noun endings
The majority of words that end in -e or -ion.
Except words ending in -age, -ege, -é, or -isme (these endings often indicate masculine words).
Masculine noun endings
Most words with other endings are masculine.
Is sujet feminine or masculine
it is masculine
le sujet
what would oiseau be
I put ma because it ended in a vowel
I couldn’t find that ending in the list
oiseau ends with u NORMALLY words ending with U are mas… so concerning possessive adj then it has to be mon oiseau
I think you should use Mon as there will be a vowel clash if u use ma
I observed that some inanimate french objects that have Pair Properties (double sides) are feminine, while others are masculine. Some of these also do have the “-e” ending following the principle above
Examples: ‘une gomme’ – an eraser has two ends.
‘une table’ – a table has four legs.
‘une regle’ – a ruler has two sides.
Other words like stylo, livre, crayon, cahier tableau are masculine as they do not seem to share this (pair) property.
Great post!
Un crayon has 2 sides
How do u say ‘they’ in both masculine and feminine form?
Masc. – Ils
Fem. – Elles
If there is one man in the group, use “ils”.
Ils is the standard if it’s a mixed group. 🙂
My rule of thumb – all feminine nouns end with ‘e’…except in rare cases like ‘homme’
The problem is that a spoken word doesn’t reveal how it ends, because the final one-to-several letters are completely silent. Take the word “Légume” when you say it, “Lay-g-ew-m” it sounds like it ends with “m”. Is that therefore a masculine word or a feminine word? As it happens, it ends with an “e”, so it’s feminine then? No, actually it’s masculine.
By the way, 80% accuracy is horrible accuracy. It’s 1 error out of every 5 nouns spoken. In 1 minute of speech you are likely to use many 10s of nouns, and thus you have to accept that unless you have memorized the gender of vast numbers (thousands) of words, you will not be able to avoid sounding like a foreigner.
Of course! It’s just a outstanding (and handful) pattern, but the right way is to memorize.
In spoken “legume” you’ll know it ends with an “e” because without the “e” you won’t be pronouncing the “m” at all
mur-wall what is it
I checked to be sure, it isn’t there!!!
It’s le mur so masculine.
Musee is masculin or feminin and why?
Masculine. “Un musée”. Why? There’s no explanation.
Musée , lycée etc think museum lyceum …suggests masculine?
Richard is right and the reason there is no explanation is that the gender of a noun isn’t related to its meaning, it’s simply the gender of the word. So words whose meaning you could consider to be feminine can be masculine, and the contrary.
Isn’t there some Greek or Latin connection? Musée , lycée etc think museum lyceum …suggests masculine?
There seems to be:
https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/musée/53378
Seems such a lot of word endings to be searching for during a conversation. Would it be radical to learn the gender along with the word? Hint:- Mnemonics!!!
Did you see the simplified list?
Feminine noun endings
The majority of words that end in -e or -ion.
Except words ending in -age, -ege, -é, or -isme (these endings often indicate masculine words).
Masculine noun endings
Most words with other endings are masculine.
You can also learn the ending of each word individually of course but I find that learning these masculine and feminine endings helps a lot.
french is sexist
Probably a bit yes, but lots of people are trying to change that. For example the administration doesn’t use the word “mademoiselle” anymore.
Relating to feminine and masculine, when you have a collective noun such as “Mes cousines.” Do you use feminine or masculine adjectives.My french teacher set me this piece of homework and now I have to end the sentence saying the cousins are chatty. But which do I use bavard (masculine) or bavarde (feminine)? Great post by the way!
Merci :).
You use the masculine form if there is at least one man in the group. In theory at least, because if there are 20 women and one man, people often use the feminine form.
I love my language (Spanish) and, if you say a ssdistic person invented French, then that would go for Spsnish, because we also say Los cabellos (masculine) and La silla (feminine). To us, that seems very logical.
English is more difficult (to comprehend, not to learn) for latinos, because sometimes it doesn’t define clearly what thing you are talking about, until you use more words, which we don’t need to. Also spelling/pronunciation makes no sense because I can’t find rules e.g. bass pronounced as “base”. Thanks.
Yeah I also find English pronunciation quite tricky, you never know what to expect!
To further complicate it, there are two different meanings for “bass.” One is a type of fish (small mouth bass/large mouth bass), the other is in reference to music and sound.
I just find American English the most difficult: their slang words often confuses me, and I had to ask my friend why it exists, and how the word is used.
I am confused with the é ending cause fraternité, egalité are females….are those exceptions? cause then there is this abandonné and it is male adjective…..can you help me out? merci
I would like to know about this too! please! 🙂
Yes these are exceptions.
“Abandonné” is different, because it’s an adjective. Adjectives don’t have a gender as such, but their ending depends on the gender of the noun they describe.
Abandonné will be used if the noun it describes is masculine, but if the noun is feminine you’d say “abandonnée”.
If a word ends with ‘eux’ is it masculine or feminine? I couldn’t seem to find it in the common endings part.
Many words ending in eux are adjectives, so they have no gender. Whether you write them as masculine or feminine depends on the noun they qualify.
Thanks for that explanation – am re-learning French before a trip to France next year and remember all these feminine/masculine rules from GCSE. Actually I’ve learned a few languages now – Dutch, Welsh, BSL and French and I find it funny that it’s mainly English that causes the problems because pretty much all these other languages all have feminine and masculine words, and since moving to Shropshire ‘cos we’re so close to the Welsh border here I find some people round here even refer to inanimate objects as “he” or “she” (like when we had the chimney swept the guy came round and said “she’s a good fire, she is” not “you’ve got a good fire there” or “its a good fire”, which I guess comes from the direct Welsh translation ‘cos in Welsh everything is either masculine or feminine too, there is no it (there is no direct yes or no either in Welsh which is even more confusing at least in French you have oui or non!).
I did start looking at the words seeing if I could figure out anyway to automatically decide which one is feminine and which is masculine and did start noticing that the majority of feminine words I came across mainly seemed to end in e (which is handy ‘cos Elle ends in E and Il doesn’t, and so does une), there was a few that didn’t quite fit into the list like the ones that ended with ion but this page has helped make that more clearer. I think one of the most confusing though is remembering that un chat is masculine – why on earth is a cat considered masculine in French when pretty much every other language even English refers to it as feminine and a “feline” (although just noticed even the French word for feline is masculine!!)
One of the other ones I couldn’t quite get my head around was mon amie because I gathered that amie must be feminine but it’s not ma amie it’s mon amie – mind you I suppose ma amie would be a bit of a mouthful!
I tend to do that too in English. It sometimes use “he” or “she” instead of “it”. And I actually find it hard to refer to animals as “it” as a Frenchman.
What you need to know is that the word has a gender, not the concept it represents. That’s why some feminine concepts have masculine words.
“Amie” is indeed feminine. The reason you say “mon” is because it starts with a “a”. And for all nouns starting with a, vowel, you use the masculine possessive adjective, whether the word actually is masculine or not.
The same would be true for “école” for example. Ecole is a feminine word, yet you say:
Mon école
Ton école
etc
Hi This Really Helped Me And I Had A Test And I Scored Highest In Class!
Merci Beaucoup!
Congrats 🙂
I took French for three years in High School and have been to France nearly 15 times, as well as French speaking Quebec. This would have been a great tool in learning the language in school no doubt… but my question is now – today…. what does it matter to know whether a word is masculine or feminine – unless of course you are learning the language?
If you don’t need to speak French it doesn’t matter. But you’ll never be able to speak French perfectly without knowing genders. That said, making mistakes won’t prevent understanding in most cases.
To remember the genders in nouns very well, I address objects and food as he or she or he/she if it’s a neuter. Instead of saying “I can’t open the door.” I’d say “I can’t open her.” Or “the soup is hot” it’s “She’s too spicy.” “The wind is blowing hard.” to “He is blowing hard.”
This sounds like a great strategy. But doesn’t it then confuse you when you speak English?
Hello,
I would like to know why the french word for water: “eau” is considered feminine when it doesn’t meet the feminine word criteria (doesn’t end with an “e” or an “ion”). Thank you
French is full of exceptions :).
Hey! Your site is a lot useful. Thank you for that!
While reading this, I simply realized there is an easier way to tell masculine from feminine nous: by checking on your list, I saw that 90% of all feminine words end with a voyelle! (vowel)
Isn’t it?!
I’m glad you like it :). I can’t confirm you that 90% of nouns do end with a vowel, because I would need to check out the entire dictionary, but it’s clear that there are lots of ways to determine the gender of French nouns, and the vowel rule may be one of them.
It would be awesome if you could come back in a few months and tell us if this rule works :).
Actually you don’t have to learn ALL those endings… If the word ends with E it is almost certainly feminine. You have to learn only those few masculine endings with E as last letter… Quite simple.
You are right, this would work quite well. However, it’s important to note that words ending in “isme” or “age” for example tend to be masculine. And that lots of words don’t end in “e”.
As I said in the article, this list is simply here for reference, I absolutely don’t recommend to learn it by heart.
Is it just me or could you narrow it down even more:
– words that end with ‘ion’ are feminine
– words that end with ‘e’ are feminine except those that end with ‘ge’ or ‘me’
– you can assume all other words are masculine?
That would probably work in most cases. The reason I haven’t written it is that I based this article on a study by McGill University and don’t have any data regarding the frequency of the simplified rule you give.
That’s definitely something I want to work on though.
I have a much simpler way to identify the vast majority of nouns as being masculine or feminine.
FEMININE: the great majority of words that end in -e or -ion.
Exceptions (usually): words ending in -age, -ege, -é, or -isme
(For all other word endings: the great majority are masculine).
That’s it. As a French high school teacher, I teach my students the above simple rule, and they know this is a “high percentage” guess — (high likelihood of being correct) — to use if they aren’t sure of the gender of a new noun. (Out of curiosity, just now I went through the vocab lists for my French II textbook — and confirmed that the above rule correctly identifies 88.5% of the nouns from those lists as feminine vs. masculine.)
(NOTE: the endings for feminine words that you listed above follow this rule for the most part, without having to remember dozens of different endings).
That’s a great way to do it, thanks for sharing :).
Well, what about “Réglisse” ?
“Réglisse” is feminine or masculine depending on the context. Many people are confused about that, so it’s okay to use the feminine or masculine form if you talk about the candy.
I have a question about masculine and feminine nouns, I just meet this: la commande (feminine)
example:
L’utilisation de la commande tmpfs peut aboutir à des pertes de données en cas de mauvaise manipulation, prenez le temps de bien comprendre ce système et ses implications !
(source https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/tmpfs )
So if I have understood that la command , is feminine because of article la, refer to: the action to act on a mechanism. So is different from le commandement (masculine)
example: Je vous laisse le commandement
Have I misunderstood or, in this case, with two different meanings of the word command (and two different ways to write it), one case has a feminine form and the other a masculine one?
You understood well. These are two different words, although their meaning and origin are similar. Lots of French words look similar but have a different gender.It depends on the ending more than on the meaning, because it’s the word itself which is feminine or masculine, not the meaning of the word.
PS : go Ubuntu 🙂
Thank you for your answer. And also,
“May the penguin be with you!!” (GNU/Linux’s penguin ‘course ^^)
i have noticed that most feminine nouns end in vowels, usually “e”.
Yes, that’s true :).
mostly if there is an e at the end, my guess is feminine
That’s often right :).
C’est génial, je ne l’avais pas dans ma grammaire. C’est un vrai cadeau.
I saw into a youtube vid that scandinavian languages have also a third gender, the neutral nouns. 🙂 But yeah, it’ s a bit hard for me to predict words’ gender. Especially with feminine gender, so basically while reading I keep an eye on feminine articles and I write down the most unpredictable to me, like: la mer la limite la foto la rentrée la chaleur la poitrine la bouffe la suite la souris la vidéo la valeur la odeur la mosaïque la planète la signification la météo la glace
I just printed it so I can keep on my desk for noticing the words’ gender and also to be reviewed from time to time.
Yeah German has a third gender too. And I think Finnish has 13.Crazy :D. French is easy in comparison.
The more you read and hear French, the most you will be able to automatically determine whether a word is feminine or masculine. It will get easier and easier with time :).
13 in Finnish?? Maybe they have also one gender to speak about aliens!?
Apart from genders. One of the nightmare of children studying French at school is the question of accents on words, but if you compare Hungarian writing and Vietnamese also, you can see that French is not so bad, in comparison.
Yeah French is actually one of the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn. When I was teaching French in Korea, I could see how difficult it was for Koreans to know in what orders to put the words, which is relatively easy for English speakers.
Yeah, I have no doubts about what you say. I was used to spend time with a Japanese friend and he explained me some issue about his language, he said also the way his father was used to speak was comprehensible to him up to 80% because his father (and his generation) have a slight different construction of the phrase compared to that of my friend’s generation. He said also that women and men know and use (I don’t know how many on the overall language) different words for the same things, this feature reflects the fact of an, old, difference of power between couple’s members. Incredible!
The past week Sam Gendreau wrote an interesting article right on Korean language. He suggests the Hangul alphabet is not so difficult to learn compared to other oriental languages. I’ ll look for Hangul on the internet out of curiosity.
I imagine that also a slight change of position of words like this:
the belief under I operate —> the belief I operate under
can create increasing misunderstanding of the various possibilities of construction of a phase.
Yeah hangul is quite easy to learn. It’s a very logical and constructed alphabet. And there are many patterns you can use when learning it.
You could probably master hangul in less than a week.
Sorry! I made a wrong example, writing in English instead of French language, but still I think it shows the meaning that I wanted explain.
Hungarian grammar is one of the trickiest there is (even though nouns don’t have genders), but I must say, that writing is way more logical than French. In Hungarian, you spell everything just the way you hear it (phonetic writing) – no silent letters. Of course, there are some exceptions, mostly archaic or borrowed words / names. What makes Hungarian writing an eyesore is that there are several compound letters and accentuation marks, which are needed express all 44(!) sounds present in the language. On the other hand, it is at least consistent – a letter always signifies the same sound.
Ex.: s is pronounced as “sh”, z as “z” – put them together, you obtain sz pronounced as “s” and zs as the first sound in the French word “jurer”, or in “manGer”.
As for vowels, there exist 12, of different lengths – o is shorter, than ó, or u is shorter than ú, etc.