Noun gender checker

Each lookup returns the noun's grammatical gender. It spells it out with its articles: the definite article (the word for "the"), the indefinite article (the word for "a") and the plural. Spanish canción comes back as la canción, una canción and las canciones, feminine. Under that sits the ending rule: 99.8% of the 3,152 nouns ending in -ción in the list are feminine, and this one follows it. A noun that breaks its rule is flagged as an exception, which is exactly where most slips happen. German nouns also get the article in all four cases. A word missing from the list gets an estimate, labelled as one. Several nouns separated by commas give a table with one line each. Nothing typed leaves the browser.

This noun gender checker covers six languages and 480,625 headwords, with dictionaries built on 30 September 2026. Five example words per language sit under the box for a first try.

• Nouns with two meanings show each one with its own gender, such as the German lake and sea.
• Nouns that accept both genders for one meaning say so, rather than picking one.
• Notes explain the traps: French elision, the Spanish stressed a, Italian lo and gli.
• Copy link keeps the language and the words in the address, so a list can be shared.

Not for nouns in the grammatical sense. "Most English nouns do not have grammatical gender" (Cambridge Dictionary, Nouns and gender): a table is simply "it", and no article changes with the noun.

What English has is natural gender. He and she follow the sex of a person or animal, and a few person nouns once came in pairs, such as actor and actress. Grammatical gender is a different thing: a class every noun belongs to, shown on the words around it.

That is why English-speaking learners find it hard. In the languages covered here the article, the adjective and often the pronoun agree with a gender English never marks. A house is feminine in French (la maison), neuter in Dutch (het huis) and masculine in Polish (ten dom), so the class belongs to the word rather than to the object.

Gender is examined from the first tier. The Department for Education's subject content for GCSE French, German and Spanish was first taught from September 2024. It lists "agreement of articles with noun for gender and number" in the Foundation tier grammar of all three languages (DfE, subject content).

Each language adds its own gender point to that shared requirement:

• French: the contraction of le and la to l' before a singular noun starting with a vowel or an h muet.
• German: the formation of compound nouns, including the rule that the final word gives the gender.
• Spanish: the contraction of el after de and a, which gives del and al.

Every noun on the vocabulary list for each tier is learnt with its gender, and the same agreement runs through A level writing. The checker reads a whole list at once, so a set of words from a lesson can be checked in one go.

Spanish had 137,236 GCSE entries in 2026, ahead of French with 125,678 and German with 33,473 (JCQ provisional results, published 20 August 2026). That order is why the page opens on Spanish.

Yes: every Spanish noun is masculine or feminine, and the article shows which, el or la, un or una, los or las. In the tool's Spanish list of 50,498 nouns, 62.7% are masculine.

Endings predict most of them, and the table gives the share of nouns in the list that follow each one.

The -o and -a rules are near certain, yet the everyday exceptions are common words: la mano, el día and la foto, short for fotografía. Only 65% of nouns in -ma are masculine, so el problema is a tendency rather than a rule.

Agua is feminine but takes el and un: el agua, un agua. A feminine noun starting with a stressed a swaps la for el in the singular only, so the plural is las aguas and an adjective stays feminine.

Some nouns carry both articles. Mar accepts el mar and la mar for the same sea, while estudiante is el estudiante or la estudiante depending on the person meant. Capital changes meaning with its gender: el capital is money, la capital a city.

French has two genders, shown by le or la and by un or une. The tool's French list holds 50,099 nouns, 63% of them masculine.

Le and la both shorten to l' before a vowel or a silent h, the h muet, so l'arbre and l'eau hide their gender. This elision is why the article alone cannot always tell; the indefinite form does, as in un arbre and une eau.

An h aspiré blocks elision: the tool gives la hache, never l'hache. The French word list marks every such h, so the right article appears without a separate rule.

Some endings are close to certain. 99.7% of the 2,912 nouns in -tion in the list are feminine, 99.9% in -ment masculine and 99.4% in -age masculine, like le fromage. The rare misses are frequent words: la plage breaks the -age rule, and le silence is masculine although 99% of nouns in -ence are feminine.

A final -e says almost nothing: only 45.1% of the 14,258 nouns ending in -e are feminine, so la maison is feminine while un arbre is masculine. Livre shows both le livre and la livre, and the meaning decides: a book or a pound.

German has three genders, each with its own article: der for masculine, die for feminine and das for neuter. Its list of 88,266 nouns splits 36.7% masculine, 42.6% feminine and 20.2% neuter. "The gender of a noun does not refer to biological gender" (BBC Bitesize), which is how das Mädchen ends up neuter.

Endings settle der, die or das for many nouns, though with very different reliability:

The -ung rule holds for 99.2% of nouns, while -e reaches 85.2% and has everyday exceptions such as der Junge. Nouns ending in -chen are neuter in 87.5% of cases; the misses are words where -chen is not the diminutive suffix, such as der Kuchen. At 46.9%, the -en ending is too weak to rely on.

Compound nouns take the gender of their last part, the rule GCSE German names. A made-up compound such as Quatschzeitung is not in any dictionary, so the tool estimates die from die Zeitung and labels the answer as an estimate.

The case changes the article too, and German results include a table of all four. Here is the definite article by case, with the plural article that serves every gender:

Some spellings carry several nouns. Der See is a lake and die See the sea, while Band has three meanings with three articles. Joghurt is accepted as der, die, das Joghurt. Die Eltern exists only in the plural. A typed plural is read back too: Kinder leads to das Kind.

The other three languages each mark gender their own way, and the lookup handles their quirks.

Italian chooses its article by the noun's first sounds as well as its gender. Before s plus a consonant, z or gn a masculine noun takes lo, uno and gli: lo studente, uno zaino, gli gnocchi. A few plurals switch gender, so l'uovo becomes le uova.

Dutch has two articles, de and het. De serves masculine and feminine nouns, 71.7% of the 108,801 in the list, as in de tafel. Het marks the neuter, as in het huis. Every diminutive takes het: het meisje, backed by 98.4% of the nouns in -je.

Polish has no articles at all, so the tool uses the test words ten, ta and to: ten kot, ta kobieta, to okno. In the plural, ci marks masculine personal nouns and te everything else, as in ci mężczyźni against te dzieci. Some nouns exist only in the plural, like te drzwi. 68.4% of the 124,065 Polish nouns listed are feminine.

Every percentage on this page and in the results is counted on the dictionary the tool uses, not quoted from a grammar book. For each ending, the build counted the nouns with it and how many have the expected gender.

• Reliable rule: 90% or more of the nouns with the ending follow it.
• Tendency: from 70%, useful as a first guess.
• Too weak to rely on: below 70%, where the article is simply learnt with the noun.

Noun endings are the only clue for a word that is not in the list. German and Dutch compounds are estimated from their last part, other words from the counts for their ending, and both are marked as estimates.

The lists come from open dictionaries: German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch from Wiktionary, French from the Grammalecte lexicon and Polish from SGJP, the grammatical dictionary of Polish. The methodology page explains how data and exceptions are checked, and every dictionary is listed under Sources.

A dictionary built from open data can miss a rare or very new word, and it sometimes lists a second gender that only specialists use. For an exam answer or a contract, a reference dictionary has the last word: Duden, the RAE, Larousse, Treccani, the Woordenlijst or SJP PWN.

The tool gives gender and articles only. It has no translations, meanings, audio or example sentences, and it follows the standard language rather than Swiss, Belgian or Latin American usage.

Accents are optional when typing: apres-midi finds après-midi. For games rather than grammar, the word unscrambler builds words from a set of letters.