What is a noun gender

Gender Nouns

In these lessons, we will learn gender nouns in English. This is part of a collection of English As A Second Language (ESL) tools & resources for students, teachers and educators.

There are four types of gender nouns in English.

Gender Nouns For People

Gender Nouns For Animals

Common Gender Nouns

Here are some examples of common gender nouns that used for both males and females.

Neuter Gender Nouns

Here are some examples of neuter gender nouns that are used for objects and places.

Gender of Nouns Flashcards: Masculine, Feminine, Common and Neuter

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English for Students

Grammar

In Grammar-Nouns, there are FOUR GENDERS.

1. Masculine gender:

A noun is said to be in the Masculine gender if it refers to a male character or member of a species.

Man, lion, hero, boy, king, horse and actor are nouns of masculine gender.

• A boy is playing in the play-ground.

• Hero of the movie is not a native of this country.

In these sentences the words “boy» and “hero» are masculine-gender nouns.

The next in the Noun-Gender is feminine gender.

2. Feminine gender:

A noun is said to be in the feminine gender if it refers to a female member of a species.

Woman, lioness, heroine, girl, mare, niece, empress, cow and actress are few of the feminine-gender nouns that we use.

• A girl is playing in the play-ground.

• Heroine of the movie is not a native of this country.

In these sentences the words “girl» and “heroine» are feminine-gender nouns.

The next in the Noun-Gender is common gender.

3. Common gender:

A noun is said to be in Common gender if it refers to a member of species which can be a male or a female.

Child, student, friend, applicant, candidate, servant, member,

parliamentarian and leader are few of the common-gender nouns.

• A child is playing in the play-ground.

• A Parliamentarian should have command over his language.

In these sentences the words, “child» and “parliamentarian» are nouns of common gender.

The next in the Noun-Gender is neuter gender.

4. Neuter gender:

A noun is said to be in the neuter gender if it refers to a member of a species which is neither a male nor a female.

Normally nouns referring to lifeless objects are in neuter nouns.

Chair, table, tree, star, mountain, street, book, car, school,
paper, pencil and computer are few of the neuter nouns which We use regularly.

• Computer has brought about drastic changes in our lives.
• Tree is cleansing the air.
• Stars are not visible in the day-time.
• Books are our best friends.

In these sentences the words, “computer», “tree», “stars» and “books» are the neuter-gender nouns.

a. Collective nouns, even if they refer to living-beings, are used as neuter-nouns.

i. The army is doing its task.

ii. The police are called to manage the situation.

In these sentences the nouns (army and police) refer to only living-beings. But they are used only as neuter-nouns.

b.Objects noted for their power, strength, and violence are used as Masculine gender nouns.

The sun, summer, time, death etc… are masculine-gender nouns.

i. The sun is so scorching now that we can not go out now to face him without an umbrella.

ii. The death is cruel. He is as certain as tomorrow.

In these sentences the words “sun» and “death» have been used as Masculine-gender nouns.

c. Objects noted for their beauty, gentleness and grace are used as feminine-gender nouns.

The moon, the earth, spring, charity etc… are feminine-gender nouns.

i. The moon is so bright at this time that she induces romantic mood in us.

ii. The earth is patient. Her beauty is spoiled day-by-day.

The masculine-genders and their respective feminine-genders have been given below for your reference.

Masculine genders——Feminine genders

1. Bachelor—— Spinster

2. Bachelor—— Maid

3. Bullock—— Heifer

10. Heir—— Heiress

11. Manager—— Manageress

12. Poet—— Poetess

13. Shepherd—— Shepherdess

14. Benefactor—— Benefactress

15. Hunter—— Huntress

16. Negro—— Negress

17. Emperor—— Empress

18. Traitor—— Traitress

19. Prince—— Princess

20. Lion—— Lioness

23. Mayor—— Mayoress

24. Tiger—— Tigress

25. Actor—— Actress

26. Host—— Hostress

29. Gentleman—— Lady

30. Duck—— Duchess

Take many pracitising exercises to become familiar with the Noun-Gender. As you read books, note down the various gender- forms of nouns that you come across in those books. That is the best method for you to know the difference among the Noun-Genters.

Gender in English – Masculine, Feminine, Common & Neuter

by sanchit_11 · Published April 12, 2021 · Updated April 17, 2021

English grammar has four types of gender – masculine, feminine, common, and neuter.

Masculine Gender

A noun that denotes a male is said to be of the masculine gender.

Examples of masculine gender are – boy, man, brother, father, dog, nephew, uncle, king, lion, hero, husband, son, monk, etc.

Feminine Gender

Examples of feminine gender in English grammar are – girl, woman, sister, mother, bitch, niece, aunt, queen, lioness, heroin, wife, daughter, nun, etc.

Common Gender

Examples of common gender are – baby, doctor, player, neighbor, friend, parent, anchor, pupil, teacher, cousin, reporter, etc.

Neuter Gender

The word ‘neuter’ means ‘neither’, which is neither male nor female. Examples of neuter gender in English grammar are – pen, laptop, book, spectacles, chairs, school, bench, room, etc.

RULES FOR FORMATION AND USAGE OF GENDER IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Mostly in English grammar, we use entirely different words for nouns with a different gender. However, still we apply certain rules while changing masculine to feminine nouns. There are four ways of forming the feminine of nouns.

Rule:1 By adding ‘-ess’ to the masculine noun

Examples of masculine to feminine gender in English grammar by addition of ‘-ess’

Rule:2 By using an entirely different word for a feminine noun

Examples of masculine to feminine gender in English grammar by using a new word

Rule:3 By replacing the main noun in a compound word

Examples of masculine to feminine gender in English grammar for a compound word

Rule:4 By addition or replacement of letters at the end of a masculine noun

Examples of masculine to feminine Gender in English Grammar

A PERSONIFICATION OF NOUNS OF NEUTER GENDER

We often personify some objects without life and speak of them as they were living beings. In other words, we regard them as males or females.

We often apply masculine gender to the neuter nouns which exhibit remarkable force, power, strength, and violence. For example – the Sun, Summer, Winter, Ocean, Time, Death, War, Thunder, Wave, Storm, etc.

Sentence examples of neuter nouns with masculine gender –

On the contrary, we apply a feminine gender to the neuter nouns which exhibit beauty, gentleness, grace, fertility, prettiness, and inferiority. For example – Earth, Moon, Spring, Hope, Virtue, Truth, Justice, Pride, Mercy, Charity, Peace, Humility, Jealousy, Fame, Modesty, Liberty, Flattery, etc.

Sentence examples of neuter nouns with feminine gender –

Dear Duolingo: What’s up with all these gendered nouns?

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for language learners. Catch up on past installments here.

Hello everyone, I’m back! Thanks to my colleagues Estelle and Nora for stepping in the last two weeks while I worked on an answer to this week’s question, which is a doozy. Such a doozy, in fact, that this will be a two-parter.

Here’s the question:

I’m learning French right now and there are a lot of masculine and feminine nouns. What’s up with this? Why are croissants all male?!

Thanks for your help,
Noun-Plussed

This is a question that has crossed the mind of every learner who has studied Spanish or French – or Russian, German, Catalan, Greek, Yiddish, Czech, Arabic, or dozens of other languages, especially those from Europe. And the answer has to do with a term you might not be familiar with: grammatical gender.

The term grammatical «gender» can be a little misleading, because it sounds like it should have something to do with human gender, or men and women, or something along those lines. And with names like «masculine» and «feminine,» it makes sense that learners look for this meaning behind grammatical gender! But really, our English word «gender» has the same root as the word «genre»: those grammatical genders are simply noun categories.

There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so this week, we’ll talk about what grammatical gender is and how it affects the grammar of a language, and we’ll mostly be focused on how gender works in some European languages. In next week’s Dear Duolingo, we’ll look at some ways to learn and practice grammatical gender, including patterns to look for in different languages.

What is grammatical gender?

Grammatical gender is a way to categorize nouns. In fact, it’s just one of many kinds of noun classification systems you’ll see across languages. Gender is a matching system, sort of in the same way that verb conjugations in many languages match the verb to the noun doing the action. Languages have a lot of ways of showing what words are related to which other words, and really that’s the core of what «grammar» is: the rules for combining words.

Here are just some of the distinctions languages make behind-the-scenes about nouns:

And that’s far from all the possibilities. (Really, I’m just begging you to ask me more about these! 😍) You might be less familiar with some of these terms, like «mass» nouns and «count» nouns, but if you know English, you already intuitively know the difference: why can’t we say «two furnitures» in English? Why do we say «two pieces of furniture»? (Spanish doesn’t have to do that!) There’s not like some real, sensical reason…in English, «furniture» is just in the group of nouns that can’t do that in our grammar. 🤷🏻‍♀️ So, when it comes to “masculine” and “feminine” nouns, the same idea applies:

Grammatical gender is a way of dividing nouns into categories.

Unlike mass and count nouns, it’s a little harder to describe this system, because each category has so many totally unrelated words. It happens to be the case that in many languages, including lots of ones in Europe, most words for men (man, boy, male teacher) are in one group, and most words for women (woman, girl, female teacher) are in another group. For the sake of a name, these groups are called masculine and feminine. In fact, these terms may have first been used only in reference to grammatical gender (and not to people), thousands of years ago!

If you’re an English speaker, you might have been able to avoid knowing that your language has mass and count nouns, but as a language learner, you might be hyper-aware of masculine and feminine nouns in your new language. But they are a noun category like any other!

Pop quiz: Is the gender of a word related to its meaning?

Before we continue, let’s do a little quiz.

True or false: The Spanish word for «house,» as in la casa (the house), is feminine because the home was traditionally seen as a woman’s space.

Answer: False! If that were the case, we might expect all words for «house» to be feminine across these grammatical gender languages, or at least ones with similar cultures or gender roles. And they’re not! The Russian word дом (dom) is masculine, and the German word Haus is neuter (a third category, basically just neither masculine nor feminine!). In fact, house words aren’t even consistent in Spanish; for example, la casa «the house» is feminine, but el hogar «the home» is masculine. See how this works?

Grammatical gender (mostly) isn’t related to a word’s meaning.

I know this is disappointing, because many of us spend our lives searching for meaning! Especially when it comes to making sense of grammar. But alas, grammatical gender is mostly arbitrary. In most cases, you won’t be able to sort of think through a word’s meaning to decide if it’s more like one category or another.

Grammatical gender in Romance languages

Let’s take a closer look at grammatical gender in Romance languages, since that includes French (which you’re studying, Noun-Plussed!) and since these are some of the most popular languages on Duolingo.

Grammatical gender evolved over time

But of course, the associations have gotten messier over time and there are plenty of words in each category that don’t end with that most-common sound. That’s because grammatical rules and pronunciations are always changing, so patterns that were (kind of) clear at earlier stages of the language may not be transparent forever.

One result was that words in the new Romance languages didn’t always have endings that made them clearly one gender or the other. But in languages with grammatical gender, all words need a gender. Speakers kind of arbitrarily ended up using one gender for the word – because (say it with me) grammatical gender is unrelated to meaning for inanimate nouns!

That’s why those sounds you associate with each category only work for most but not nearly all of the words in that category. Old Latin noun categories got changed and combined, and speakers had to figure out what to do with words as they continued to evolve and change.

There’s no simple answer

Grammatical gender is evidence of a long, complex history of a language’s grammar, and it’s never easy to answer “why” certain rules exist in a language. Humans naturally look for meaning and patterns, across lots of domains, and that’s why we’re such good language learners! Next time on Dear Duolingo we’ll get into the gender patterns of a few languages and offer some ideas for learning gender in a new language. And remember to submit your questions about language and learning to Dear Duolingo!

Russian/Grammar/Gender

This page explains the concept of gender in language. If you have studied another language that has gender, such as French or Spanish, and so are familiar with grammatical gender, feel free to skip this section.

Contents

What gender is [ edit | edit source ]

‘Gender’ is a way of categorising nouns in a language. In most languages, words are described as being ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, and a lot of languages, including Russian, also have words described as ‘neuter’ (i.e., neutral, or no gender). In languages like French, the gender of a particular word is mostly arbitrary: there’s nothing in the word peau (‘skin’) that tells us it’s a feminine word, and so a word’s gender is largely just something you have to learn. Fortunately, in Russian, gender can be predicted. Like most other things in Russian, the gender of a noun is denoted by what letters are on the end of the word:

Masculine nouns end in a consonant: б, в, г, д, ж, з, й к, л, м, н, п, р, с, т, ф, х, ч, ц, ш, or щ. Notice that й is a consonant. For example, кролик (KRO-leek, ‘rabbit’) ends in a consonant, -к, so it is a masculine word. Feminine nouns end in а or я. For example, собака (so-BA-ka, ‘dog’) ends in an -a, so it is a feminine word. Neuter nouns end in о or е. For example, письмо (pees-MO, ‘letter’) ends in an -o, so it is grammatically neuter. Nouns ending in -ь can be either masculine or feminine. These just have to be memorised.

So, in Russian, nouns have an intrinsic property called ‘gender’, which comes in three types: masculine, feminine, and neuter. But why is this important?

What gender is for [ edit | edit source ]

Gender affects a lot of different parts of Russian grammar, and so is an important part of learning Russian. Fortunately, it’s easy to learn, and easy to use.

Plurals [ edit | edit source ]

As such, it is perhaps easiest to think of plurals as a ‘fourth gender’, and this is the way summary tables in this Wikibook will be presented.

Examples [ edit | edit source ]

This section lists some common words by their gender.