Le genre par les suffixes I (-tion/-té/-ée)

Unité GR-07 · campagne 2 · le genre se lit à la fin du mot.

Gender is not memorized noun by noun — at B2 it is predicted from the ending, and the first family of endings is remarkably reliable.

Feminine, almost without fail:

• -tion / -sion — la nation, la décision, la solution, l'attention
• -té (abstract nouns) — la santé, la liberté, la beauté, la société
• -ée — la journée, l'année, l'idée, la pensée

The counter-currents to know:

1. Nouns in plain -é run masculine: le marché, le degré — and a short list of -té nouns is masculine too, learnt as words: le comité, le côté, l'été.
2. A short list of -ée masculines survives from Greek and Latin: le musée, le lycée, le mausolée. These three do most of the exam damage.

The rule and its exceptions matter beyond the article: whatever gender the suffix predicts propagates down the whole agreement chain you will assemble in GR-09 — la décision importante, une valeur essentielle. Write the wrong article and every adjective downstream inherits the error.

The practice set makes you commit: high-frequency -tion/-té nouns against the musée/lycée traps, in full sentences where the article is the only clue you get to place.

Going further

Why the rule exists. A suffix is the part of the word that makes it a noun — décision beside décider, liberté beside libre — and each suffix entered French with one gender. Latin -tio and -tas were feminine, and most of their nouns stayed feminine as French -tion and -té (été, from Latin aestas, is the famous exception); -ée continues a Latin feminine past participle (journée: what the day holds). So the gender sits on the ending because the ending is what built the noun.

Minimal pairs. One change between the two sentences, and what it does:

The errors to watch.

From Russian and English. Russian also reads gender off the ending (-а/-я feminine, a consonant masculine, -о/-е neuter), so the method is familiar — but the Russian gender does not travel. Решение is neuter, la décision feminine; общество neuter, la société feminine. French has no neuter, and a Russian -ие / -ство noun can land on either French gender: read the French ending, never translate the Russian one. English has no grammatical gender at all — nothing misleads, and nothing helps.

The complete rule. -tion / -sion: feminine for every noun a learner meets. Plain -ion after another letter is not the suffix and is often masculine: le camion, l'avion, le million, le lion. -té: feminine, abstract or concrete (la cité, l'université, la société); the masculine exceptions are a short list to learn as words — le côté, l'été, le pâté, le comité, le traité, le député — plus nouns made from past participles (le velouté, le raté). -ée: feminine except chiefly a Greek-and-Latin list — le musée, le lycée, le trophée, le mausolée, l'apogée — plus le rez-de-chaussée.

The gender is visible only on the determiner, which is why the determiner families are worth knowing: Qu'est-ce qu'un déterminant ? Le sens de chaque famille.

Loading the exercise...

Checking your progress...