How to identify grammatical gender in German?

The most reliable way to identify the gender of a noun in German is to look at the it is used with. Unfortunately, unlike other languages, the ending of the noun itself usually won’t be enough, so you’ll need to look at the surrounding context.

German nouns can come in three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Notice how the form of the article depends on the gender of the noun.

In this post, we’ll introduce the concept of grammatical gender in German and teach you some tricks for identifying a noun’s gender. Let’s have a look!

In German, all nouns fall into one of three groups: masculine, feminine, or neuter. We refer to the category a noun belongs to as its grammatical gender.

These categories might sound familiar from English pronouns like “he” (masculine), “she” (feminine), or “it” (neuter). In English, we use “he” for males, “she” for females, and “it” for non-living things.

In German, though, things are a little more arbitrary.

• In some cases, males are masculine while females are feminine:

  masculine article

  der Sohn

  the son

  → male and masculine

  feminine article

  die Tochter

  the daughter

  → female and feminine

  In German, there are a few categories of words where grammatical gender does generally pattern with the real-world sex or gender of the individual they refer to:

  • Names → “Mike” is masculine; “Lucy” is feminine

  • Kinship terms → der Sohn(the son), die Tochter(the daughter)

  • Professions → der Lehrer(the male teacher), die Lehrerin(the female teacher)

• But some nouns for living beings (even humans) that are clearly male or female will be grammatically neuter instead.

  neuter article

  das Mädchen

  the girl

  → female and neuter

• Additionally, there are many nouns for non-living things or ideas that are grammatically masculine or feminine.

  masculine article

  der Apfel

  the apple

  → non-living and masculine

  feminine article

  die Pizza

  the pizza

  → non-living and feminine

So in German a girl is an “it,” an apple is a “he” and a pizza is a “she”?!? Actually, this is pretty typical grammatical gender in the world’s languages. You’ll see similar patterns in Spanish, French, Russian, and more.

At its heart, a noun’s grammatical gender is just a grammatical pattern it follows. Knowing a noun’s gender will tell you which articles to use, what forms of adjectives to use, etc.

We talk about nouns in terms of their “gender” only because nouns for males default to masculine while nouns for females default to feminine. This does not mean that other nouns can’t be in the “masculine” or “feminine” buckets, nor does it mean that all nouns for males or females pattern this way.

If we need to name those patterns we could just as well rename masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns der, die, and das nouns or even apple, pizza and ice cream nouns — whatever helps you remember the pattern!

When you “meet” a new German noun, the best way to identify its gender is to look at the surrounding words. Often articles, adjectives, or other modifying words will reflect the noun’s gender.

• der + noun = masculine

• die + noun = feminine

• das + noun = neuter

Unfortunately, unlike some other languages, there aren’t many noun endings in German that you can rely on to tell you the gender of a noun. Though there are a few endings that can give you a hint, a lot of nouns won’t have one of these endings, so you can’t rely on them being there.

The best way to memorize the gender of a German noun is to always learn nouns along with the definite article . So, don’t just put Flasche(bottle) on your flash cards, put die Flasche.

There are, however, a couple of tricks to remember. Though these won’t help you with all German nouns, they will help you with some of them!

Some German nouns can be used as though they belong to more than one gender (i.e. they can be used with two or even three different articles).

With a few nouns, a different gender goes with a different meaning. For example:

Some other nouns may belong to different genders in different dialects of German. For example:

There has also been a year-long debate among Germans whether the nation’s favorite cocoa hazelnut spread should be called der, die, or das Nutella. And we still haven’t come to an agreement!

You might be wondering about how we can predict the grammatical gender of compound nouns like Fußballnationalmannschaft(national football team).

This time, there’s a rule that applies to 100% of all German words! Let’s look at some examples to see if you can derive the rule yourselves:

• die Ehe

  the marriage

  der Mann

  the man

  =

  der Ehemann

  the husband

• das Kind

  the child

  der Garten

  the garden

  =

  der Kindergarten

  the kindergarten

• der Tisch

  the table

  das Bien

  the leg

  =

  das Tischbein

  the table leg

As you can see, it’s always the very last noun of the compound that determines the gender. Did you get it right?

And now you know that we say die Fußballnationalmannschaft because we say die Mannschaft (remember, all nouns ending in -schaft are feminine!)

Let’s summarize what you’ve learned about gender and the definite articles so far:

• Do not confuse grammatical gender with biological sex! They don’t usually match in German.

• You can often tell the grammatical gender of a noun from its shape or its meaning, but in many cases, you should simply learn the article along with the noun.

• The gender of compound nouns is always determined by the gender of the last word.

Are you ready to practice what we just saw? Try out these exercises to practice German noun gender! Or, to review, you can check out our German noun gender study sheet!