Russian nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter. Look at the last letter: a consonant or -й means masculine, -а or -я means feminine, -о or -е means neuter. Nouns ending in the soft sign -ь can be either masculine or feminine and have to be learned.
1. What “gender” means for a word
In grammar, gender is just a category that a noun belongs to. It has little to do with real male and female: a table (стол) is masculine and a book (кни́га) is feminine for no deeper reason. Think of it as a label that tells other words how to behave.
English has a small trace of this. You call a man “he”, a woman “she” and a thing “it”. Russian does the same, except that things can be “he” or “she” too:
2. The last-letter rule
Here is every ending a Russian noun can have in its dictionary form, and the gender it points to. A consonant is any letter that isn’t a vowel (а, е, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я).
| Ends in | Gender | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| -□ (consonant) | Masculineabout half of all nouns | |
| -й | Masculine | |
| -а | Femininethe most common feminine ending | |
| -я | Feminine | |
| -о | Neuter | |
| -е | Neuter | |
| -ь | Eithermasculine or feminine: see section 3 |
3. The soft-sign problem: -ь
Nouns ending in the soft sign ь are the one real gap in the rule: some are masculine, some feminine. There’s no way to tell from the letter alone, but these patterns cover most of them.
4. The exceptions worth knowing
There are only a handful of groups that break the last-letter rule, and most of them make sense once you see them.
If a noun means a man, it’s masculine, whatever its ending. It still changes like a feminine noun in the cases, but adjectives and verbs treat it as masculine: мой па́па был до́ма, “my dad was home”.
There are just ten of these, and they’re all neuter even though they end in -я. Two of them you’ll use every day.
Borrowed words ending in -о, -и, -у or -е don’t take case endings at all, and most are neuter. For people and animals, gender follows the real sex: мой ма́ленький кенгуру́.
ко́фе should be neuter by the rule above, but it’s traditionally masculine: чёрный ко́фе, “black coffee”. Saying чёрное ко́фе is now accepted in speech, but sounds careless to many Russians.
A few nouns ending in -а describe a person of either sex. They take the gender of whoever they refer to: он/она́ мой колле́га, “he/she is my colleague”.
5. Why gender matters: words agree
Gender isn’t just a label. Every word that goes with a noun changes to match it: “my”, “this”, adjectives like “new”, and even verbs in the past tense. This matching is called agreement.
That’s why knowing a noun’s gender is worth the effort: it tells you the right ending for four or five other words in the sentence. The full rules are in adjective endings.
6. Jobs and people: when gender meets real life
Many words for jobs are grammatically masculine, even when they describe a woman. The noun keeps its masculine form, but the past-tense verb usually matches the real person:
Some jobs do have a feminine form: учи́тель → учи́тельница (teacher), студе́нт → студе́нтка (student), актёр → актри́са (actor/actress).
7. Borrowed words and abbreviations
Foreign words and abbreviations that never change usually take the gender of the general word they stand for: Со́чи is a го́род (city), so it’s masculine.
8. Guess the gender
Look at the last letter and choose. Some of these are exceptions from section 4.