French feminine gender
In French, all nouns have a gender: they are either masculine or feminine. Additionally, words such as adjectives and articles are usually inflected for gender to agree with the noun they modify.
For example
la chaise haute
une sœur heureuse
toutes les étudiantes
How to know whether a word is feminine
There's no absolute rule for knowing a noun's gender - you simply have to learn the noun along with an indicator of its gender, such as the indefinite article (une table).
But there are a few tendencies that can help you recognise some feminine words:
- Most nouns that refer to female people and animals are feminine (e.g. femme, mère, étudiante, cousine).
- About 75% of nouns that end in -e are feminine (e.g. table, fille, cuisine, Angleterre), as are nearly all words that end in -sion, -son, -té, -tié, or -tion.
