Every noun has a gender

Explicación

Every Spanish noun has a grammatical gender — masculine or feminine — including inanimate objects and abstract ideas: el libro, la mesa, el amor, la libertad. There is no neuter for nouns. Gender is a property of the word, not of any logic about the thing.

Gender is the engine of agreement: articles, adjectives, and pronouns must all match the noun. El libro nuevo, la mesa nueva, los libros nuevos, las mesas nuevas — change the noun's gender and everything around it changes too.

The practical takeaway: learn every noun together with its article from the start. Memorizing mesa alone is half the job; la mesa is the complete unit, because the article carries the gender you'll need for every word that agrees with it.

Ejemplos

Reglas relacionadas

• Guessing gender from the ending
• Adjective agreement: gender and number