Die Neutra

Neuter nouns are Latin's third gender, alongside masculine and feminine. English has a neuter too ("it"), but in Latin gender is a grammatical label that changes a noun's endings and the adjectives that go with it, so you must learn each noun's gender as part of the word.

Neuter nouns follow one iron rule that makes them easy to spot: the nominative and accusative are always identical, and in the plural they always end in -a. Common ones are second-declension words in -um (bellum, war; dōnum, gift) and many third-declension words (corpus, body; nōmen, name).

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	bellum	bella
Accusative	bellum	bella
Genitive	bellī	bellōrum
Dative/Ablative	bellō	bellīs

Examples:

• Bellum est malum. - War is bad.
• Dōna puerīs dat. - She gives gifts to the boys.

Here is the English-speaker trap: because nominative and accusative look the same, you cannot tell subject from object by the ending, and the plural -a can be mistaken for a first-declension singular like puella. In Bellum pācem dēlet, only the verb and sense tell you "war destroys peace" rather than the reverse. Lean on word order and context whenever a neuter is involved.