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How to tell the gender of an Italian word

Sometime back I wrote about “Springett’s Rule of Gender“. It was my discovery when I was learning French and my French teacher, a Parisian language graduate, couldn’t tell me how the French people know whether a new noun is masculine or feminine.

I’ve often wondered whether the rule might work with other European languages such as Italian, Spanish, German (which has three genders – he, she and it), but never had reason to test it.

Then we recently started learning Italian in preparation for a 4 week stay in Rome this year. Most of the words are easy. If it ends with “o” it’s almost always masculine and if it ends with “a” it’s almost always feminine. But, there are quite a lot of words that end with “e” and some of them are masculine, others feminine. So is it “il lezione” or “la lezione”? How to get it right most of the time? Again, our Italian teacher, a South African who lived in Rome for 12 years, couldn’t answer the question.

I did the same with these words as I did with French. Listed a whole bunch of them separated into masculine and feminine. Then looked to see if the m’s had something in common and the f’s had something else in common.

It turned out that, in Italian, it’s the last 3 letters of the word that determine its gender.

For example, words ending with “nte”, “ore”, “ere” are almost certainly masculine, while words ending with “one”, “ine”, “cie” are almost certainly feminine.

The beauty of this rule is that you don’t have to learn which ending is which gender. Because you know a few masculine words that end with, for instance, “ere”, when you come across another “ere” word, you will instinctively treat is as masculine because that just “feels right”.

So, if I know that it’s “la lezione”, “la cazone”, “la pressione”, then when I come across “stazione”, “la stazione” will just “feel right”, and it is right!

Oh, how I wish language teachers knew this rule!

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