Luso

I’ve been working on this post since I was in primary school and this is now the fourth incarnation. The last version, written 3 years ago, was given the once-over by my teacher (Cristina of the excellent Say it in Portuguese podcast) who has fine-tuned it, adding some tweaks, and suggesting a few exceptions other than the ones on my original list.

OK, so if you’re a new learner, you’ve probably come across a few explanations of how gender works in Portuguese, and how to work out if a given word is masculine or feminine just by looking at it. Different teachers have slightly different rules so I sat down to road-test them and see which versions were reliable and which had so many exceptions that they weren’t worth bothering with. I used a list of the 1000 most popular portuguese nouns (details in Appendix 3 below) and used excel formulae to see what rule *should* apply vs what gender it actually has.

How To Use The Rules

More specific rules nearer the top override more general ones further down. So for example, Avó is feminine because it meets the “Male and Female people” rule even though it ends in an O and “Programa” meets the “Greek words” rule so doesn’t need tobe referred to the ending-in-A rule. Sorry about the colour-scheme, but… well, you know… just trying to harness my cultural stereotypes in a way that makes it easier to follow.

*=Note that some of these change their endings but some – like dirigente, cientista, keep the same ending.

**= Jeremy Clarkson would love this, I’m sure

***= Some guides say anything ending in -ama, but loads of portuguese words ending in -ama are red herrings and not from greek: chama, cama, lama, fama, ama and on and on.

****= “Vaguely” because they don’t take articles. Some sources say this means they have no gender. At the risk of claiming to know more about portuguese than Ciberdúvidas, or my own teacher, I don’t really agree with this though. OK, I know the lack of article makes it less obvious, but if you have to apply an adjective, you’re going to have to commit to an A or an O on the end of it. As near as I can tell, this usually seems to be an A, maybe because the word “cidade” itself is feminine, and I think if I was in an exam situation I would try and phrase it in such a way that I was saying “Coimbra is a beautiful city” instead of “Coimbra is beautiful” to avoid any ambiguity. 

*****= It might be redundant, this one: virtually all of them end in -a, apart from a  few -ção words, so they would all be feminine anyway.

Rules I Have Deleted in this Version

à – There used to be a rule here about -ã words being feminine, but after seeing a list of exceptions, I did a little digging and I reckon it’s more-or-less fifty-fifty. It might not matter very much because they’re quite rare (there are zero in the top-1000 list) and I think the only reason it’s a rule at all is that most of the words you come across day to day are words like alemã, capitã, irmã, anfitriã, cidadã: in other words feminine forms of words that would normally have -ão on the end and be masculine! I’ve already got this covered with the very first rule in the list so I don’t think the rest of the rule is needed

Countries – Countries are a special case, and rather than list them, it’s probably best to point you to this map on WIkipedia.

Z – Like Ã, Z-endings are fairly rare, but it seems like there are so many exceptions that I can’t really treat it as a reliable rule. 

Appendix 1: Not-So-Easy E

A few of the rules in the table have endings like “-ice” or “-ade”, but what if the word ends in an e and none of the other rules apply?

Some teachers say that nouns ending in E are split between abstract and concrete. However, as you can see, contrary to the textbook rule, it’s mixed pretty evenly on both sides. Conclusion: the rule is bollocks, I’m afraid, and we’ll just have to learn these the hard way.

(NB Corte appears in both sides because it can mean either “The court” or “The cut”, both reasonably common but having differing genders just to be bloody awkward)

Apprendix 2: Mistakes, Mis-Shapes, Misfits

When I’d counted all the words that fit the rules and the exceptions, there was a short list left over of words that met none of the rules. The majority seem to be masculine, apart from fé, lei, ordem and nuvem.

• a fé
• o fim
• o gás
• o jardim
• a lei
• o mês
• a nuvem
• a ordem
• o país
• o pé
• o som
• o tom

Appendix 3: the List of 1000 Most-used Portuguese Words

I got the list from a site called Hackingportuguese (now defunct) but I took out a couple of words that I saw that were Brazil-specific and a couple that looked like they were (at least in European Portuguese) only used as adjectives, and replaced them with random nouns from a Memrise deck, to bulk it up to a thousand again. I subjected the survivors to extreme torture in an excel spreadsheet in order to see how many exceptions there were, using Excel formulae to check the ending against the supposed rule. My version of the list is available as a spreadsheet here in case you want to play with it and check my work.

Appendix 4: Twinsies

Here are a few words that can have different genders but their meanings change depending on the gender:

o rádio – that device on your kitchen counter 

a rádio – the radio station

o moral – morale

a moral – morality

o capital – the stuff that keeps capitalism working

a capital – where the politicians are busy running capitalism

o polícia – a copper (a female police officer is a mulher-polícia)

a polícia – the cops.

Appendix 5: Notes for People Who Are Insufficiently Confused

There are a few words that are a bit ambiguous and change between regions. I don’t have a definitive list but if you follow the comments under this reddit post you’ll get a few different opinions. Ignore the bloke who says the AO has eliminated all differences between PT-BR and PT-PT, he seems to be high on crack.

Genders can change a little over time. If you ever have an urge to be unhappy, here is a paper you can read about that.

Finally, you might like to check out a series of three texts I wrote about some weird edge-cases for grammatical gender, and especially about gender neutral pronouns. The most recent one is here but it’s a bit short. Probably the best, most informative is this one.