Nouns and gender

After this page you will be able to guess the gender of most Ukrainian nouns from their dictionary form. You will know the main exceptions to that guess and how to check a noun’s gender in a dictionary. You will also see, as a preview, why gender matters: other words change to agree with it.

Three genders

Every Ukrainian noun is masculine, feminine or neuter. This is a grammatical category, not a statement about sex. Tables, books and windows have a gender just as people and animals do. You can often tell which pronoun replaces a noun from its gender: він (he) for masculine nouns, вона́ (she) for feminine nouns and воно́ (it) for neuter nouns. In English, all three are usually it when the noun is a thing.

Guessing gender from the ending

Look at the last letter of the dictionary form (the nominative singular). It is a good first guess, and it works for most nouns a beginner meets.

The guess fails often enough that the best habit is to learn every noun together with its gender. The sections below show where it fails.

Where the guess goes wrong

A final -я can be feminine or neuter

Земля́ and столи́ця (capital city) are feminine. But many neuter nouns also end in -я. Two groups are easy to spot:

• A doubled consonant before -я usually means a neuter noun: навча́ння (studying), життя́ (life). One common exception: стаття́ (article) is feminine. Many nouns of this kind are made from verbs and end in -ння.
• Words for young animals, and a few others, in -я are neuter and add extra letters before most endings: кошеня́ (kitten), plural кошеня́та; ім’я́ (name), plural імена́.

A final consonant can be feminine

Most nouns that end in a consonant are masculine, but some feminine nouns do too. A final ь does not settle it either way.

Masculine nouns in -о, -а and -я

Some masculine nouns, mostly words for men, end in a vowel:

• in -о: ба́тько (father), та́то (dad);
• in -а or -я: men’s names such as Мико́ла and Ілля́.

These words still take masculine agreement: мій та́то (my dad), мій ба́тько (my father).

Nouns of common gender

A few nouns in -а or -я can be either masculine or feminine. This is called common gender. Сирота́ (orphan) is one: the Горох dictionary marks it as both masculine and feminine. Which gender applies depends on whether a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, is meant.

Grammatical gender and the person meant

Gender is a property of the word. Дити́на (child) and люди́на (person, human being) are feminine nouns whether they refer to a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.

Loanwords that never change

Some borrowed words end in a vowel and are never declined. Кафе́ (café) and кіно́ (cinema) are neuter, and they have the same form in every case.

Nouns that are only plural

Some nouns exist only in the plural, even when they name a single object. They have no singular, so there is no gender to learn: words that agree with them simply take plural forms.

Why gender matters

Gender is not just a label in the dictionary. Words that go with a noun change their ending to match its gender (and its number and case). This is called agreement. Here is a preview with the dictionary forms of three kinds of words. You will meet each of them properly on later pages.

Every word in a phrase has to agree, so a wrong guess about gender shows up several times in a sentence. That is why it pays to learn the gender with the noun.

How to check a noun’s gender

When you are not sure, look the noun up. Ukrainian dictionaries give the gender of each noun.

• Горох (goroh.pp.ua) shows the gender on the word’s inflection page, словозмі́на: for example іме́нник, жіно́чий рід (noun, feminine) for кни́га. For plural-only nouns such as две́рі it says множи́нний instead of a gender.
• Dictionary definitions use abbreviations after the headword, such as ж. (жіно́чий, feminine), с. (сере́дній, neuter) and мн. (множина́, plural; used for plural-only nouns).

The inflection page also shows all the case forms and the stress, which you will need later.

Common mistakes and limits