Nouns

German nouns have one of three grammatical genders. Unfortunately this word gender in English is a bit confusing, think of it more like genre or category.

The three categories are known as masculine, feminine, and neuter. Each one has a matching definite article – der, die, and das.

der Garten	der Winter	der Tee
the garden	the winter	the tea
die Schule	die Temperatur	die Tomate
the school	the temperature	the tomato
das Haus	das Pfund	das Jahr
the house	the pound	the year

The gender of the word also determines the ending of the adjectives that describe it. We’ll go into that in more detail later on as it involves a bit of memorization.

German nouns have singular and plural forms. The plural is often regularly formed by adding -n or -en, but there are enough irregular plurals that the plural of a noun is usually listed in dictionaries along with the definition.

The plural definite article is always die.

die Sprache	die Sprachen
the language	the languages
das Magazin	die Magazine
the magazine	the magazines
der Mann	die Männer
the man	the men

In all writing that’s even a little bit formal, all German nouns are capitalized. Online writing like social media or text chats usually doesn’t keep the same standards.

As a general rule, German noun gender is unpredictable.

However, there are two neat tricks that you can use to make an educated guess at the gender of the noun.

First off, just under half of all German nouns are feminine. If in total doubt, guess feminine. But two-thirds of monosyllabic nouns are masculine!

Second, many nouns have similar endings, kind of like -ist or -tion in English. At the end of this guide, you can find a table of common noun endings with predictable genders.