femininenoun

Feminine noun is a noun that belongs to the feminine gender in languages that mark grammatical gender. In such languages, a noun's gender influences agreement with determiners, adjectives, and sometimes verbs or pronouns. A feminine noun does not necessarily indicate the natural sex of an object or person, though it often reflects biological gender for human referents. Gender can be arbitrary or historically derived, and some nouns change gender across languages.

In Spanish and French, feminine nouns take feminine articles and adjectives: la casa, la table; una casa bonita, une table rouge. In German, feminine nouns use the article die in the nominative and often require feminine agreement in adjectives and pronouns; common feminine noun endings include -heit, -keit, -ung, -schaft, though endings are not definitive.

Some languages distinguish gender more or less strongly. Others have natural gender or more than one gender or none at all. English largely lacks grammatical gender in nouns, though some gendered forms survive in pairs such as actor/actress, and many of these are shifting toward gender-neutral usage.

Learning about feminine nouns involves recognizing gender markers, memorizing exceptions, and applying correct agreement in determiner and adjective forms. In many languages, gender is a stable grammatical category, but it can also reflect historical sound changes and lexical drift, producing varied results even for the same base noun across languages.