introduction

Grammatical gender indicates whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter.

All German nouns have a grammatical gender. In the dictionary you will usually see the abbreviations  m  (masculine = male), f (feminine = female)  and  n (neuter = neutral).

In German, you often can’t tell from looking at a noun whether it’s masculine, feminine, or neuter. That’s why it’s best to always learn German nouns together with their articles.

However, there are certain features of some nouns that can help you identify their gender. These distinguishing marks are listed here:

Compound Nouns

When a noun is formed from several other nouns combined into one word, the last noun in the word determines the gender of the entire word.

Example:

der Tisch  +  das  Bein  =  das  Tischbein