Every French noun is either masculine or feminine — even for objects with no biological gender (une table, un livre). There's no way to guess it from meaning alone, so the trick is to always learn a noun together with its article (un livre, not just livre). The good news: plurals are far more predictable, once you know a handful of patterns.
1. Masculine or feminine?
For people and animals, gender usually follows biological sex (un homme / une femme). For objects and abstract ideas, it's arbitrary — le soleil (the sun) is masculine, la lune (the moon) is feminine, and there's no logic to memorize beyond the word itself.
2. Useful clues (not absolute rules)
Certain noun endings lean strongly one way or the other. They're not 100% reliable, but they're right often enough to be a useful first guess.
Often masculine
- -age → le fromage, le voyage
- -ment → le gouvernement
- -eau → le bureau, le tableau
- -isme → le tourisme
Often feminine
- -tion / -sion → la télévision, la nation
- -té → la beauté, la liberté
- -ette → la baguette
- -euse → la danseuse
3. Masculine / feminine pairs (people)
For people, the feminine form is often built by adding -e, or by changing the ending in a predictable way.
| un ami → une amie | a friend |
| un étudiant → une étudiante | a student |
| un serveur → une serveuse | a server |
| un acteur → une actrice | an actor |
| un boulanger → une boulangère | a baker |
4. The regular plural
In writing, most nouns simply add -s.
| un chat → des chats | cats |
| une maison → des maisons | houses |
5. Irregular plurals
| Pattern | Example | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| -eau → -eaux | un bureau | des bureaux |
| -eu → -eux | un jeu | des jeux |
| -al → -aux | un animal | des animaux |
| already ending in -s / -x / -z → unchanged | un prix | des prix |
| fully irregular | un œil | des yeux |
Exceptions to -al → -aux: a few words like un bal, un carnaval, un festival just add -s (des bals, des carnavals, des festivals).