masculinenoun

Masculine noun is a noun classified as masculine in a language that uses grammatical gender. The classification is a grammatical category that governs agreement with determiners, adjectives, and pronouns, and is not necessarily tied to the biological sex of the referent.

Languages with grammatical gender typically assign each noun to a gender class, commonly masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter or other classes. The masculine class is often associated with male beings but also includes many inanimate objects and abstract concepts. The gender of a noun influences concord throughout a sentence; for example, articles or adjectives must agree in gender and number with the noun. In Spanish, for instance, masculine nouns take the definite article el and often have adjectives ending in -o; feminine nouns take la and adjectives ending in -a. In German, masculine nouns occur with the determiner der and have characteristic adjective endings; in Russian, masculine nouns commonly end in a consonant or -й and affect adjective agreement and past-tense verbs.

Not all nouns with masculine form denote male entities. Some languages use gender for semantic or historical reasons; some nouns have masculine gender despite referring to female beings. Exceptions and irregularities abound, and some languages reassign gender historically or in loanwords. A well-known Spanish example is el problema (the problem), which is masculine despite ending in -a, and la mano (the hand), which is feminine despite ending in -o, reflecting historical gender assignments.

English and other languages without grammatical gender do not treat masculine nouns as a separate grammatical class; in those languages the term often appears in analytic discussions about gender systems rather than in native grammar. The concept of masculine nouns is therefore chiefly relevant in the study of languages with grammatical gender and is used to describe how nouns align with determiners, adjectives, and verbs across cases and numbers.