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French Nouns A to Z, With Their Gender

The 3,000 French nouns you are most likely to meet, filed A to Z. Each one has its own page with the gender, every article form, the plural, example sentences, and the ending rule that explains it.

Pick a letter to see every noun under it, or start with the most common ones below. On each letter page you can filter by gender, or show only the exceptions: the nouns whose gender breaks the usual pattern for their ending, which are the ones worth memorizing.

At a glance

The nouns that work with either gender are mostly words for people, like un or une élève, plus a few whose meaning changes with the article. Those are covered in nouns that change meaning by gender.

The 100 most common French nouns

Ranked by how often they come up in everyday spoken French. If you are building vocabulary, learn these first, each with its article attached.

How the list was put together

The nouns are the most frequent ones in a large corpus of French film subtitles, which reflects the French people actually speak better than newspapers or books do. Each noun's gender comes from the same dictionary data behind the lookup tool, and the full set of more than 140,000 nouns is free to download. Frequency data from Lexique 4 (New & Pallier) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Common questions

Are most French nouns masculine or feminine?

Masculine is the more common gender, but feminine is close behind. Of the 3,000 nouns in this list, 51 percent are masculine and 42 percent are feminine. That is too close to make guessing masculine a safe default, so learn each noun with its article.

Which French nouns should I learn first?

The most frequent ones, because they make up most of what you will hear and read. The table on this page lists the 100 most common nouns in order. Learn each one with le, la, un, or une attached, and pay extra attention to any marked as an exception to its ending.

How were these nouns chosen?

They are the most frequent French nouns in a large corpus of film subtitles, which tracks everyday spoken French more closely than written sources do. Function words and a few adjectives that the corpus tags as nouns are left out.

Looking for a noun that is not on the list? Look it up on the home page. For the patterns behind the genders, see the gender rules by ending and the complete guide to French noun gender.