2. Most nouns ending in -o are masculine. Examples: Su nuevo carro le costó muy caro. El lago es muy claro.

3. Nouns ending in -ción or -sión are feminine: Esta es mi canción favorita. Mi mamá tiene la tensión [blood pressure] baja. Todos tenemos que resistir la tentación.

4. Nouns ending in -dad, -tad or -tud are feminine: Round Rock es una ciudad pequeña. La libertad es preciosa. Con esa actitud negativa, nunca vas a tener éxito.

5. Nouns ending in -e or most consonants have to be memorized. Nouns in -e are feminine slightly more often than masculine (about 60-40), but there’s no pattern to help you figure it out. There’s no rule whatsoever for other consonants.

La leche es nutritiva. but Mezzaluna es un restaurante italiano.

El lápiz but la matriz [matrix]

La fuente [fountain] but el puente [bridge]

(Notice that rule #5 provides a really good argument for learning your vocab as sentences rather than isolated words. You’ll find that’s even more true when you combine it with all the stuff below.)

THE REAL EXCEPTIONS:

Nouns that break these rules do so for three basic reasons:

1. They’re abbreviations: La moto(cicleta) es muy poderosa. Tu foto(grafía) es linda.

2. They’re Greek! A lot of Greek words that end in -a are masculine in Greek. Spanish adopted many of these words in the medieval period, when education throughout Europe was done in Greek and Latin. People who were educated enough to use these words were also educated enough to think it was cool to show off the fact that they really knew Greek by keeping the words masculine even when they used them in Spanish. Many of these words end in -ema, -ama, or -eta, and have to do with astronomy, geography, philosophy or logic, literature, and other things that the ancient Greeks were famous for and medieval scholars therefore read about in Greek:

El programa es muy complicado. Sófocles escribió varios dramas famosos. Hale-Bopp es un cometa interesantísimo.

"¿Ser, o no ser? He allí el dilema."--Guillermo Shakespeare

(*Why, then, do you suppose it’s un planeta but una camioneta?)

3. They just do. A few nouns, like mano, día, and mapa, are just exceptions. There actually is some long, complicated explanation about them being nouns of the Latin third declension, but you really don’t wanna go there. Just be on the lookout for them and memorize them. There aren’t very many.

The famous buenos días. Levanten la mano derecha si tienen preguntas. ¿Por qué los hombres nunca quieren mirar un mapa cuando están perdidos?

SOME APPARENT EXCEPTIONS:

There are a few nouns that seem to break the rules but really don’t if you look at them closely.

1. Most of these are feminine nouns that use a masculine article because they start with an accented a:

El agua está fría. but Las aguas de este lago son claras.

Agua is a feminine noun! It uses a feminine adjective. It uses a feminine article in the plural. You just can’t pronounce *La agua* in Spanish; it sounds really ugly. Las aguas works because that s keeps the two a’s apart.

2. Words that end in -ista do not change according to the gender of the person they describe, but their modifiers (adjectives and articles) do.

Picasso fue un artista famoso. but Georgia O’Keefe es una artista norteamericana.

(It’s important to note that what’s going on here is that -ista is an invariable suffix, just like the -e in estudiante. Other nouns that can refer to either women or men use articles and adjectives that agree with the grammatical gender of the word, not the physical gender of the person: Juan es una persona simpática. Depending on how your brain works, it might help you to know that the word género refers to grammatical gender of a word, but not to people. In Spanish, "gender" of people is sexo.)

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