Purpose

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

Lesson Explanation

Every Italian noun has a grammatical gender: masculine or feminine. A reliable pattern: nouns ending in -o are usually masculine (il libro), and nouns ending in -a are usually feminine (la casa). Nouns ending in -e can be either gender and must be memorized individually: il padre (father, masculine), la notte (night, feminine).

A genuinely distinctive Italian feature with no direct Spanish equivalent: plurals change the FINAL VOWEL rather than adding “-s”: masculine -o → -i (libro → libri); feminine -a → -e (casa → case); nouns ending in -e (either gender) → -i (padre → padri, notte → notti).

A small but important exception group: nouns ending in -a of Greek origin are masculine, and genuinely irregular in the plural, changing to -i instead of the expected feminine -e: il problema → i problemi, il tema → i temi — the masculine gender carries through consistently, but the plural pattern shifts to match other masculine nouns rather than the “-a” ending’s usual feminine pattern.

Also genuinely irregular: nouns ending in an accented vowel don’t change at all in the plural (la città → le città, the city/cities), and nouns ending in -io with the “i” unstressed drop one “i” in the plural (il figlio → i figli, not “figlii”). Gender also determines which definite/indefinite article a noun takes — a system genuinely more complex than Spanish’s, covered fully in the next lesson.

Practice Questions