All nouns in Latin have a gender. There are three genders in the Latin language - masculine, feminine, and neuter.
A noun's gender doesn't always have something to do with the noun - it's just a grammatical quality. For example, the word for eye, oculus, oculi, is masculine, but the word for tree, arbor, arboris, is feminine. The word for river, flumen, fluminis, is neuter. And for a completely unexplainable example, the word uterus, uteri (womb) is masculine, even though men don't have wombs. I don't know what the Romans were thinking on that one.
That's why it's important to learn the gender of a word when you learn a word itself. There is unfortunately no way to tell for sure what gender a word is by looking at it or knowing its meaning. (And even though the gender of a word can usually be predicted in first, second, and fifth declension, there are exceptions.)
Here are a few general rules about gender in Latin.
There are a few rules that apply to ALL neuter nouns, no matter what declension they are:
A noun's gender doesn't always have something to do with the noun - it's just a grammatical quality. For example, the word for eye, oculus, oculi, is masculine, but the word for tree, arbor, arboris, is feminine. The word for river, flumen, fluminis, is neuter. And for a completely unexplainable example, the word uterus, uteri (womb) is masculine, even though men don't have wombs. I don't know what the Romans were thinking on that one.
That's why it's important to learn the gender of a word when you learn a word itself. There is unfortunately no way to tell for sure what gender a word is by looking at it or knowing its meaning. (And even though the gender of a word can usually be predicted in first, second, and fifth declension, there are exceptions.)
Here are a few general rules about gender in Latin.
- All first declension nouns except words that refer to people who do certain jobs/professions are feminine.
- Most common exceptions:
- agricola, agricolae: farmer
- nauta, nautae: sailor
- poeta, poetae: poet
- pirata, piratae: pirate
- incola, incolae: inhabitant
- Most common exceptions:
- All second declension nouns that end in -us, -r, or -er are masculine, except for names of trees and some places (such as Roma, Romae - Rome - which is feminine)
- All second declension nouns that end in -um are neuter. There are no exceptions.
- All fifth declension nouns are feminine except dies, diei (day), which is masculine.
There are a few rules that apply to ALL neuter nouns, no matter what declension they are:
- Nominative and accusative are always the same.
- Nominative and accusative plural always end in -a, no matter what declension. (This doesn't apply to pronouns.)
