French grammar · Beginner
French Nouns: Gender, Plurals, and How to Predict Both
Every French noun has a grammatical gender, masculine or feminine, and that gender controls the article, the adjectives, and sometimes the past participle around it. Most plurals simply add -s, but the ending of a noun is also the best available clue to its gender.
What it is
Gender in French is a property of the word, not of the thing it names: une table is feminine and un livre is masculine for no reason you could reason out. What you can do is read the ending, which predicts gender correctly most of the time.
la nation, la beauté, la fourchette are feminine (-tion, -té, -ette). Le fromage, le moment, le bureau are masculine (-age, -ment, -eau).
How to spot it
Learn the noun with its article attached, as one unit. Storing une table rather than table is the single habit that prevents years of guessing.
- un livre → des livres — a book → books (regular -s)
- un journal → des journaux — a newspaper → newspapers (-al → -aux)
- un château → des châteaux — a castle → castles (-eau → -eaux)
- un prix → des prix — a price → prices (already ends in -s, -x, -z)
The plural -s is silent. In speech, the article is what tells a listener whether you meant one or many: le livre versus les livres.
Nouns Quick Reference
Endings that predict gender
| Ending | Usually | Examples | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| -tion, -sion | Feminine | la nation, la décision | — |
| -té, -tié | Feminine | la liberté, la moitié | le côté, l'été |
| -ette, -elle | Feminine | la fourchette, la poubelle | le squelette |
| -ance, -ence | Feminine | la chance, la science | le silence |
| -age | Masculine | le fromage, le voyage | la page, la plage, l'image |
| -ment | Masculine | le moment, le bâtiment | la jument |
| -eau | Masculine | le bureau, le château | l'eau, la peau |
| -isme | Masculine | le tourisme, le réalisme | — |
All 9 nouns lessons
Nouns are the foundation the rest of French agreement is built on, because gender and number propagate outwards to every article, adjective, and pronoun attached to them. These lessons cover the ending patterns that predict gender, the irregular plurals, and the compound nouns that pluralize by their own rules.
- Masculine Nouns — Every French noun is either masculine or feminine, and the masculine ones take le, un, ce, and mon. Gender is not guesswork: endings such as -age, -ment, -eau, -isme, and -oir are reliably masculine, and whole families of words — days, months, languages, trees, metals — are masculine as a group.
- Inversion with Nouns — When the subject of an inverted question is a noun rather than a pronoun, French cannot simply swap the two words. The noun stays in front of the verb and a matching pronoun is added behind it with a hyphen: Le train part-il bientôt ? A handful of question words allow the simpler pattern where the noun moves behind the verb instead.
- Plural Nouns — Most French nouns form their plural by adding a silent -s. Nouns ending in -al become -aux, most in -eau and -eu add -x, and nouns already ending in -s, -x, or -z don't change at all. Because the ending is silent, the article is what tells a listener you meant more than one.
- Feminine Noun Endings — French gender is not random once you look at the end of the word. Around twenty endings — among them -tion, -té, -ance, -ure, -ette, -esse and -aison — make a noun feminine almost every time. Each of those endings comes with a short list of exceptions, and those exceptions are worth learning as a set because they are the words you will meet most often.
- Feminine Nouns — A feminine noun in French is one that takes la, une, cette and ma, and that pulls every adjective and past participle around it into the feminine as well. For objects the gender is simply a property of the word; for people it is usually built from the masculine form, as in un boulanger becoming une boulangère.
- Colour Adjective Agreement — Most French colour adjectives agree with the noun in gender and number, so une robe verte and des rideaux verts. But colours borrowed from the name of an object — orange, marron, cerise, turquoise — never change, and neither does a colour described by two words, such as bleu clair. Knowing which group a colour belongs to is the whole of this topic.
- Masculine Noun Endings — A noun that ends in -age, -ment, -eau, -isme, -oir, -ier, -in, -on, -et, -al or -ard is almost always masculine, which means it takes le, un and l' rather than la or une. Masculine is also the gender French falls back on when it has no reason to choose: borrowed words, acronyms and words made out of verbs all arrive masculine.
- Compound Noun Plurals — A French compound noun pluralises from the inside out: only the nouns and adjectives within it can take a plural mark, and verbs, prepositions and adverbs never do. That is why un chou-fleur gives des choux-fleurs but un ouvre-boîte gives des ouvre-boîtes, with the verb ouvre untouched.
- Singular Nouns — The singular is the base form of a French noun, the one that carries its gender and takes le, la, l', un, une, du or de la. French also keeps the singular in several places where English reaches for a plural: one item per person, uncountable quantities, and collective nouns like la police, which take a singular verb.
Nouns FAQs
- How do I know if a French noun is masculine or feminine?
- The ending is the strongest clue. Nouns in -tion, -té, -ette, -ance, and -ure are usually feminine; nouns in -age, -ment, -eau, -isme, and -oir are usually masculine. There are enough exceptions that you should still learn each noun together with its article.
- How do you make French nouns plural?
- Add -s to most nouns. Nouns ending in -al become -aux (journal, journaux), most in -eau and -eu add -x (bateaux, cheveux), and nouns already ending in -s, -x, or -z don't change at all (un prix, des prix).
- Does the plural -s change the pronunciation?
- No, the -s is silent, which means le livre and les livres differ only in the article when spoken. This is why French relies so heavily on articles, and why dropping them makes a sentence genuinely ambiguous rather than just awkward.
- Why do some nouns change meaning with gender?
- A handful of French nouns exist in both genders with different meanings: le livre is a book but la livre is a pound, and le tour is a turn while la tour is a tower. The article isn't decoration in those cases, it's the only thing distinguishing the two words.
- How do compound nouns form their plural?
- It depends on what the parts are. Noun-plus-noun and adjective-plus-noun compounds usually pluralize both parts (des coffres-forts), while verb-plus-noun compounds leave the verb alone (des ouvre-boîtes). It's one of the areas where checking a dictionary is genuinely faster than reasoning.