Portál španělského jazyka

Types of noun (masculine, vacillant, etc)

• 
  Applied to persons and most domesticated animals:
  
  • 
    Declinable nouns. The feminine form adds a or replaces the final vowel by a. Examples: el profesor/la profesora, el presidente/la presidenta, el perro/la perra.
    
  • 
    Invariant nouns (in Spanish, sustantivos de género común). The feminine form and the masculine form are identical: el artista/la artista, el testigo/la testigo, el estudiante/la estudiante.
    
  • 
    Nouns with a unique gramatical gender. The noun has a fixed gender, regardless of the sex of the person it describes: el personaje, la visita. A recent politically correct usage substitutes the plural inclusive masculine (amigos, "friends, male or of any gender") with the character @ (amig@s) in writing, or with the longer form (amigos y amigas, or amigas y amigos). @ appears as a blend of o and a. This usage is unpronounceable, and mostly restricted to informal internet-speak. In leftist graffiti and posters, @ can be substituted by the anarchist symbol (), that also seems to blend O and A.
    
• 
  Applied to wild and some domesticated animals:
  
  • 
    Nouns where the two sexes of animals have different words to describe them: el toro/la vaca, el caballo/la yegua.
    
  • 
    Epicene nouns. The gender of the noun is fixed and sex is indicated by macho (male) or hembra (female). Examples: la jirafa macho, la jirafa hembra, el rinoceronte macho, el rinoceronte hembra.
    
• 
  Applied to things:
  
  • 
    Masculine or inclusive: el pan.
    
• 
  Feminine or exclusive: la leche.
  
  • 
    Vacillant (called sustantivos ambiguos in Spanish). Either gender is acceptable: Internet is an example of this. Speakers hesitate between making it masculine like other loanwords from English, or making it feminine to agree with red, "net". Linde ("boundary") and testuz ("animal's forehead") can be either gender. Azúcar is probably the quirkiest example of such nouns. It can be masculine with el, feminine with el (bizarrely) or feminine with la. The determiner seems to go in the masculine in standard use: el, este, ese, tanto. Any adjectives agreeing with it are usually masculine in Spain and feminine in Latin America: el azúcar moreno o blanco / el azúcar negra o rubia. Mar is a special case. It is normally masculine, but in poetry and sailors' speech it is feminine. Arte is masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, though it can be feminine in the singular when it means "art-form" and masculine in the plural in the expression los artes de pesca, "fishing gear".
    
  • 
    In some cases the same word can take two genders with a different meaning for each. In that case it is better to say that there are two discrete words. El capital = "funds"; la capital = "capital city".
    

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Determining gender from endings

Nouns ending in -o are masculine, with the only notable exception of the word mano ("hand"); -a is typically feminine; other vowels and consonants are more often than not masculine, but many are feminine, particularly those referring to women (la madre) or ending in -ción, -dad, -ez (la nación, la soledad, la vejez).

A small set of words of Greek origin and ending in -ma are masculine: problema "problem", lema "lemma, motto", tema "theme, topic", sistema "system", telegrama "telegram", etc.

Words taken from foreign languages may:

• 
  Take the gender they have in that language, with neuter taken to be the same as masculine (so English nouns are made masculine)
  
• 
  Take the gender it seems to be (e.g. la Coca-Cola because it ends in -a)
  
• 
  Take the gender of the closest-related Spanish word (e.g. la Guinness because of la cerveza)
  

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Gender of proper nouns (names)

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Names of people

People's names agree with the sex of the person, even if they appear to be the opposite:

• 
  Chema es guapo
  
• 
  Amparo es guapa
  

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Names of settlements

Usage for places varies. You can choose between making them:

• 
  Feminine if they end in -a, otherwise masculine:
  
  • 
    la Barcelona de Gaudí
    
  • 
    el Londres de Dickens
    
• 
  Agree with the underlying noun el pueblo or la ciudad
  
  • 
    Nueva York (city)
    
  • 
    la antigua Cartago (city)
    
  • 
    Fraga es pequeño (village/small town)
    
• 
  Always masculine: (this usage may seem wrong to some speakers)
  
  • 
    Barcelona no es pequeño
    
  • 
    Londres no es pequeño
    

With examples like New York, the Nueva is a fixed part of the name and so cannot be made masculine, but New Mexico is translated as Nuevo México and considered masculine, since México is a masculine noun.

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Rivers

Rivers are masculine because of the underlying masculine noun río. The ancient Roman belief that rivers (amnes) were male gods may also influence this. Locally, a few rivers may be feminine, but the masculine is always safe and correct.

• 
  el [río de la] Plata = "The River Plate" (literally "the River of Silver")
  
• 
  el [río] Támesis = "The River Thames"
  
• 
  el [río] Tajo = "The River Tagus"
  
• 
  el [río] Colorado = "The Colorado River" (literally "the Red River")
  
• 
  el [río] Cinca / la Cinca = "The River Cinca" (in the Aragonese Pyrenees)
  

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Diminutives and suffixes

Spanish nouns can be made by adding a very productive set of suffixes to existing nouns and adjectives. This usually just slightly modifies the meaning, but sometimes it creates something new entirely.

The most common subset of such suffixes are the diminutives, which convey the idea of smallness, delicateness, etc. (also for endearing terms). The most common diminutive in Spanish is -it-. It is added to the root of the noun, and in actual usage it takes the proper agreement for gender and number.

• 
  planta → plantita ("plant" → "little plant")
  
• 
  vaso → vasito ("glass" → "little glass")
  
• 
  niño → niñito ("small boy" → "little tiny boy")
  

When the word does not end in a vowel, -it- becomes -cit- if the word ends in -n. Agreement marks are added to it according to the gender and number:

• 
  botón → botoncito
  
• 
  Carmen → Carmencita
  

When the base word ends in z, an epenthetic e is inserted (notice the orthographic change): pez → pececito. There is no fixed when the base ends in other consonants: azúcar → azuquítar or azuquita.

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Local flavour

The choice of diminutive is often a mark of regional dialects and influence of coexistent Romance languages. Educated speakers who would use -ito or no diminutive at all in more formal speech may use local forms when they want a friendlier or more colourful way of expressing themselves, sometimes borrowing another region's diminutive.

So, instead of the standard -ito, you could find:

• 
  -illo in Andalusia (’quillo for chico is a typical Seville interjection)
  
• 
  -ico in Aragon
  
• 
  -ín or -ino in Asturias, as in Asturian
  
• 
  -iño in Galicia, as in Galician
  
• 
  -uco in Cantabria
  
• 
  -ete from Catalan
  
• 
  -uelo
  

In fossilised forms, these can be found in standard words, such as burro → borrico, Venecia → Venezuela, etc.

Sometimes different suffixes are used for variety when more than one is used at once:

• 
  chico → chiquito → chiquitín
  

Other suffixes

As well as being an Andalusian (especially Seville) alternative to -ito, the suffix -illo is also a special diminutive with a nuance of "a funny sort of...". It is also used to create new nouns:

• 
  palo "stick" → palillo "toothpick"
  
• 
  bolso "handbag" → bolsillo "pocket"
  
• 
  guerra "war" → guerrilla "hit-and-run warfare"
  

An example of the same phenomenon, but using an augmentative, is -ón:

• 
  soltero "bachelor" → solterón "confirmed bachelor"
  
• 
  soltera "single woman" → solterona "spinster"
  

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Number

There are two grammatical numbers: singular and plural. The singular form is the one found in dictionaries (base form). The plural is indicated in most words by adding -s (if the base form ends in a vowel) or -es otherwise. Note that final y in words like rey, though phonetically a vowel, counts as a consonant (rey → reyes).

The masculine gender is used for plural forms of mixed sexes (it is inclusive): los niños, grammatically masculine, may mean "the children" or "the boys". The feminine gender is exclusive in the plural: las niñas = "the little girls". When male sex needs to be shown exclusively in the plural, phrases such as los niños varones are used. Feminists (and their satirists) try to reverse the pattern with phrases such as las personas humanas jóvenes varones = "the young male human people".

Some words are formally always grammatically plural: pantalones "trousers", tijeras "scissors". In many dialects, however, these words are taken to be semantic plurals, and their singular forms are used instead: pantalón, tijera.

In expressions with an indefinite determiner, singular forms are used (unlike English, where "some" and "any" tend to modify plural nouns).

• 
  Si hay algún árbol, lo derribaremos = "If there are any trees, we will fell them"
  
• 
  Por cualquier medio = "By any means"
  

Forms of ninguno ("no") always take singular noun phrases, even where plurality might be intended:

• 
  Ningún obstáculo se interpone = "No obstacle is in our way", "There are no obstacles in our way"
  
• 
  No vi ninguna mujer = "I saw no women", "I didn't see any women"
  

The determiner cualquiera has a plural form (cualesquiera), but it is never used outside formal or technical contexts.

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