Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to determine the gender of a Spanish noun using reliable ending patterns and form regular and irregular plurals correctly.

Lesson Explanation

Every Spanish noun has a grammatical gender: masculine or feminine. While gender is often unpredictable and must be learned with the noun, several ending patterns are genuinely reliable: nouns ending in -o are usually masculine (el libro), and nouns ending in -a are usually feminine (la casa). Nouns ending in -ción, -sión, -dad, and -tud are almost always feminine (la nación, la pasión, la ciudad, la actitud) — a genuinely dependable rule with very few exceptions.

A small but important exception group: nouns ending in -ma of Greek origin are masculine despite the “-a” ending: el problema, el sistema, el tema. Also memorize the reverse exceptions: la mano (the hand) and la foto (the photo) are feminine despite ending in “-o.”

Plural formation: nouns ending in a vowel add -s (libro → libros); nouns ending in a consonant add -es (ciudad → ciudades). Nouns ending in unstressed -s preceded by an unstressed syllable don’t change in the plural (el lunes → los lunes). A genuinely important spelling detail: nouns ending in -z change to -ces in the plural (lápiz → lápices), and a written accent can appear or disappear in the plural simply because adding a syllable shifts where the natural stress falls — for example nación → naciones loses its accent, since “naciones” is already stressed correctly on that syllable without one.

Gender also determines which definite/indefinite article a noun takes — a system covered fully in the next lesson.

Practice Questions