Le genre par les suffixes II (-age/-eau/-isme…)

Unité GR-08 · campagne 3 · les terminaisons masculines et leurs pièges.

GR-07 gave you the feminine endings; here is the masculine battery.

Masculine, with high reliability:

• -age — le voyage, le paysage, le message, le courage
• -eau — le bureau, le tableau, le niveau, le cadeau
• -isme — l'optimisme, le réalisme, le tourisme (no exceptions worth learning — -isme is the safest bet in the whole gender system)
• -ment — le gouvernement, le changement, le comportement

The famous feminines hiding in masculine clothes:

1. In la plage, la page, la cage, l'image, la nage, the -age is not the suffix at all — it belongs to the word's root. No suffix, no prediction: these are feminine.
2. L'eau and la peau are feminine despite the -eau ending — two words, endlessly recycled in exams precisely because the rule says otherwise.

Notice the shape of this pillar's logic, the same as the article units: a strong rule, then a short closed list of exceptions you learn as words, not as grammar. Rule plus list beats intuition every time — Russian gender intuitions transfer just often enough to feel trustworthy, which is exactly why they fossilize.

The items below alternate clean suffix predictions with the plage / image / eau / peau traps until the closed list is truly closed.

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