French Noun Gender Guides

Everything on this site about French noun gender, in one place. New to it? Start with the complete guide. Need a specific answer? Use the lookup tool.

Guides

French Noun Gender: A Complete Guide
Start here. What gender changes, how much of it you can predict, and how to learn the rest.
Gender Rules by Ending
The reference tables: which endings signal which gender, how reliable each pattern is, and the exceptions.
Gender by Category
Whole groups that share a gender: languages, days, countries, metals, colors, and more.
Nouns That Change Meaning by Gender
Words like le / la livre and le / la tour, where the gender decides the meaning.
Nouns English Speakers Get Wrong
The gender everyone guesses wrong, grouped by why, including the Spanish-cognate traps.
Memory Tricks
Techniques for remembering the words that break the patterns, and the exceptions to learn cold.

Downloads

Printable Cheat Sheet (PDF)
A free two-page summary of the ending rules, the categories, and the exceptions.
French Noun Gender Dataset (CSV)
A free CSV of about 142,000 nouns and the gender of each one.