![]() ![]() Guifa, a top contributor to this StackExchange, makes reference to this in the thread, "Origin of gender-neutral nouns. Spanish refers to these types of nouns as "common gender" ( género común) nouns. The other thing that really jumped out at me from this study of nouns appeared in the category I'll call "epicene nouns," which, linguistically, means the noun form does not change for male or female biological gender. But, if you do encounter one and need to guess, it appears that guessing that it is masculine is a good bet. I don't know how much this will help you since nouns ending in -e only appear to comprise 10 percent of nouns (across all categories - those taking both biological and grammatical gender and those with just grammatical gender). It appears that nouns that end in -e are almost three times as likely to be masculine as they are to be feminine. However, to more directly answer your question:Īre the majority of words ending in e masculine or feminine? Only 5 words in this set of nouns ended in a vowel other than -e ("ley," "taxi," "espiritú," "menú," and "whisky"). What I discovered, among nouns with just grammatical gender, is that 97 percent of the time, if a noun does not end in -a or -o, that vowel ending is going to be -e. I didn't set out to study nouns that ended in -e, but thought it would be good to have a category for nouns that ended in a vowel other than -a or -o. I can't say that what I'm about to add definitively answers your question because, for starters, I didn't look at every noun in the Spanish lexicon, but you may find it interesting, nonetheless.įirst of all, I grouped these nouns into two main categories - those that have both biological and grammatical gender (e.g., "chico") and those that have just grammatical gender (e.g., "año"). What percentage of nouns ending in -a are masculine and what percentage of nouns ending in -o are feminine?īut in the process compiled data that may add insight to your inquiry. This question has received a number of good responses already and I see that one has already been checked as the best one, but I recently did a study on a list of 2,000 of the most frequent nouns in Spanish (which I subsequently whittled down to 1,800). ![]()
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