Masculine or feminine: How to get the gender of French nouns (mostly) right
The le, the la and the l’ugly - for anyone learning the language, French nouns can be a nightmare to master, but there is a technique that can make it simpler. Although we're not promising that there are no exceptions.
thelocal.fr
2/1/20242 min read
Anglophones find it endlessly hilarious that words like bite (a slang term for penis) are feminine while breast and vagina are both masculine (le sein, le vagin). French people don't really get the joke, because they don't see the grammatical masculine or feminine as having anything to do with men, women, sex or gender.
Instead, it's really more to do with the construction of the word and its spelling, which is where the '80 percent trick' comes in . . .
Rules - what are rules?
Proof that French nouns don’t follow sensible rules comes with the fact that the noun feminism is masculine (le féminisme), and the noun masculinity is feminine (la masculinité).
Meanwhile, old guardians of the French language, the Académie française, ruled that Covid (the word) is feminine (la covid) because it’s an illness (une maladie). But dictionaries Le Larousse and Le Robert originally listed it as masculine (le covid) because it’s a virus (un virus). If the gatekeepers of French cannot agree, and if the genders of the nouns themselves don’t necessarily make complete sense, what hope is there for the rest of us?
And don’t get us started on synonyms - for example it’s une chaise (a chair - feminine) but un fauteuil (an armchair - masculine).
The thing is, gender really does matter in the French language. The gender of a noun (whether it’s a le or la word) influences any related pronouns, adjectives and verbs … and it even completely changes the meaning of some words.
Adjectives must agree
Adjectives in French conform to the gender and the quantity of the noun - a masculine plural noun needs a masculine plural adjective. Another bit that makes sense, right?
Most follow a regular pattern - if the masculine adjective ends with the letter -c (blanc / blancs), then the feminine ending is -che (blanche / blanches). An -f ending to a masculine adjective becomes -ve in the feminine. A masculine adjective ending with -eux leads to a feminine adjective ending of -euse.
Except these...
And then there are those well-known, often-used adjectives that follow rules entirely of their own making. We give you:
Beautiful: beau, bel, belle, beaux, belles
New: nouveau, nouvel, nouvelle, nouveaux, nouvelles
Old: vieux, vieil, vieille, vieux, vieilles
You just have to learn them. Sorry. But don’t throw those French books away just yet. Before you get completely downhearted and set out to learn Spanish instead, there is a trick that means you’ll be right well over half the time.
For the full rules and list of endings click here.
Learn French in London | The French Frog
