Nouns

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Noms

One of the eight parts of speech, a noun is commonly defined as "a person, place, or thing." If that seems vague, that’s because it is: nouns can be visible (water) or invisible (air), they can be concrete (books) or abstract (ideas). Some are commonplace (stones), some are rare (diamonds), and others are non-existent (unobtainium). Generally speaking, if you can use "a," "the," "some," or "this" in front of any stand-alone word, it’s a noun.

Gender

In French, all nouns have a gender. Stones and ideas are feminine, while books and diamonds are masculine. This can be hard to wrap your mind around, but it might help to think about gender in English, limited as it is. Girls and women are feminine, which is reflected grammatically in the use of "she" and "her," while boys and men are masculine: "he" and "his." The difference is that in French, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender.

  It is absolutely essential to learn the gender of a noun at the same time as you learn the noun. The best way to do this is by learning an article with every noun, rather than just the noun itself. Don’t make vocabulary lists like this:

• livre – book
• idée – idea
• pierre – stone
• diamant – diamond

But rather, like this:

• un livre – book
• une idée – idea
• une pierre – stone
• un diamant – diamond

That way, the article will be attached to to the noun in your brain, and you won’t spend the next several years asking people (as those of us who did not learn genders and nouns together constantly do) "is ___ masculine or feminine?" Gender is an intrinsic part of French grammar – adjectives, certain pronouns, and even some verbs change to agree with the gender of the nouns they are used with, so by learning gender and nouns together, you’ll make all of these other aspects of French grammar that much easier.

That said, there are some tendencies that can help you determine the gender of a noun.

1) Noun categories

Certain categories of nouns are always or usually one gender or the other:

• Masculine noun categories
• Feminine noun categories

2) Noun endings

Certain endings are always or usually one gender or the other:

• Masculine noun endings
• Feminine noun endings

Feminine Forms and Plurals

Like English nouns, most French nouns have singular and plural forms. In addition, French nouns referring to people and animals often have different masculine and feminine forms, which means that these nouns can have up to four forms – learn more.

 French nouns and adjectives

• Introduction to nouns
• Feminine and plural nouns
• Irregular feminine forms
• Irregular plurals
• Introduction to adjectives

Related lessons

• Nouns that are always singular
• Nouns that are always plural
• Compound nouns
• Parts of speech
• Adjectives used as nouns
   

 En español

• Sustantivos
   

 In italiano

• Sostantivi
   

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