Género femenino

Spanish Feminine Gender

In Spanish, all nouns have a gender: they are either masculine or feminine. Additionally, words such as adjectives and articles are usually inflected for gender to agree with the noun they modify. For example:

la mesa redonda
the round table

una niña baja
a short girl

todas las sillas
all the chairs

How to know whether a word is feminine

There's no absolute rule for knowing a noun's gender - you simply have to learn the noun along with an indicator of its gender, such as the indefinite article (una mesa).

But there are a few tendencies that can help you recognise some feminine words: 

  • Most nouns that refer to female people and animals are feminine (e.g. mujer, gata, madre, prima, abuela, etc.).
  • Most nouns that end in -a are generally feminine. (una cama, una casa, la salida, la mesa, etc.) 
  • The majority of words that end in -dad or -ión are also feminine. (la verdad, la igualdad, la estación, la revolución, etc.).
There are exceptions to the general rule, for example: el problema, una, el avión etc.
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