Gender - Easy Learning Grammar French

1 Nouns referring to people

• Most nouns referring to men and boys are masculine.

• Most nouns referring to women and girls are feminine.

• When the same word is used to refer to either men/boys or women/girls, its gender usually changes depending on the sex of the person it refers to.

• In English, we can sometimes make a word masculine or feminine by changing the ending, for example, Englishman and Englishwoman, or prince and princess. In French, very often the ending of a noun changes depending on whether it refers to a man or a woman.

• For more information on Masculine and feminine forms of words, see Nouns.

2 Nouns referring to animals

• In English we can choose between words like bull or cow, depending on the sex of the animal we are referring to. In French too there are sometimes separate words for male and female animals.

• Sometimes, the same word with different endings is used for male and female animals.

• Words for other animals do not change according to the sex of the animal. Just learn the French word with its gender, which is always the same.

3 Nouns referring to things

• In English, we call all things – for example, table, car, book, apple – ‘it’. In French, however, things are either masculine or feminine. As things do not divide into sexes the way humans and animals do, there are no physical clues to help you with their gender in French. Try to learn the gender as you learn the word.
• There are lots of rules to help you:

• words ending in -e are generally feminine (une boulangerie a baker’s; une banque a bank)
• words ending in a consonant (any letter except a, e, i, o or u) are generally masculine (un aéroport an airport; un film a film)

• There are some exceptions to these rules, so it is best to check in a dictionary if you are unsure.
• These endings are often found on masculine nouns.

• The following types of word are also masculine:

• names of the days of the week, and the months and seasons of the year

• the names of languages

• most metric weights and measures

• English nouns used in French

• These endings are often found on feminine nouns.

4 Masculine and feminine forms of words

• In French there are sometimes very different words for men and women, and for male and female animals, just as in English.

• Many masculine French nouns can be made feminine simply by changing the ending. This is usually done by adding an -e to the masculine noun to form the feminine.

• If the masculine singular form already ends in -e, no further e is added.

5 Some other patterns

• Some changes to endings from masculine to feminine are a little more complicated but still fall into a regular pattern.