Noun gender

Grammatical gender sorts every Latin noun into one of three groups: masculine, feminine, or neuter. This is not about biological sex; it is a grammatical class that decides which adjective endings and pronouns a noun takes. You learn a noun's gender as part of the word, the way you learn its spelling.

English has almost no grammatical gender, so this is a genuinely new idea. We say "the big table" no matter what; Latin makes the adjective agree with the noun's gender, so gender is something you must track from the start.

Gender	Typical example	Rough guide
Masculine	servus (slave), puer (boy)	many 2nd-decl. -us/-er
Feminine	puella (girl), rosa (rose)	most 1st-decl. -a
Neuter	bellum (war), nōmen (name)	2nd-decl. -um and many 3rd-decl.

Gender controls agreement:

• servus bonus - a good slave (masc.)
• puella bona - a good girl (fem.)
• bellum malum - a bad war (neut.)

Two cautions. Do not assume gender always matches meaning or ending: agricola (farmer) ends in -a but is masculine because farmers were men, and third-declension nouns give few visible clues, so learn their gender from the dictionary. When you meet a new noun, store three things together: the word, its genitive, and its gender.