gente

Gente is a feminine noun used in Spanish and Portuguese to mean "people" or "persons" and is generally treated as a singular term, even when referring to a larger group. In Spanish, phrases such as la gente, mucha gente, and poca gente are common, and adjectives typically appear in the feminine form while the verb agrees with the singular noun: La gente es amable; Mucha gente ha llegado. The word refers to people in general or to a group of unspecified size, rather than to countable individuals. It is often used to denote the public or a community, as in la gente de este barrio.

Etymology and cognates: Gente comes from Latin gens, gentis, meaning a clan, tribe, or people. It has cognates in other Romance languages, such as Italian gente and French gens, all carrying the sense of a population or group of people.

Usage notes: While similar to personas or individuos, gente emphasizes a collective or social sense rather than strict counting. In contexts where the focus is on individuals or discrete persons, the noun personas is more common. In idiomatic expressions, la gente de bien refers to "good people" or respectable folk.

In Portuguese, gente also means "people" and is widely used in everyday speech. Additionally, in Brazilian Portuguese, a gente functions as a first-person plural pronoun equivalent to "we," as in a gente vai sair (we’re going to go out), rather than merely a noun for people.

See also: persona, población, público.