French noun gender is a way of categorising all nouns (naming words) in the French language into either the masculine category or the feminine category. English used to have noun genders but they have all been lost, with the exception of ships being traditionally regarded as feminine, as in the phrase, “Bless her and all who sail in her.”

French noun gender is based on two things: Firstly, the spelling of the noun and secondly, the spelling of the Latin word that the French noun comes from.

Masculine nouns typically end in a consonant (any letter of the alphabet except a, e, i, o or u).

Feminine nouns typically end in a silent “e”.

There are many exceptions to these two rules. For example, nouns that end in -tion or -sion are usually feminine, and nouns that end in -age are usually masculine. But learning these exceptions is faster than having to memorise, one by one, the gender of every single noun in French.

Except in the case of people or animals, French noun gender has nothing to do with whether a noun has masculine or feminine associations. For example, the army “l’armée” is feminine, based purely on its spelling. And the word for love, “l’amour,” is masculine, again based on its spelling.

The exceptions to this are nouns that indicate male and female versions of people or animals, such as “le chien” (the dog) and “la chienne” (the female dog), or nouns which indicate professions and which have been recently modified to include feminine versions, such as “l’avocat” for the lawyer or the male lawyer, and “l’avocate” for the female lawyer.

In such cases, the masculine version is also used as the neuter version. So “le chien” can mean “the male dog” but it usually means “the dog of indeterminate (unknown) gender.”

More intuitively, words like “le garçon” meaning “the boy” are masculine and words like “la fille” meaning “the girl” are feminine.

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