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, un día, el avión etc.
