Gender

Italian nouns have grammatical gender, which means they are classified as masculine or feminine. Determining the gender of a noun is important because it affects the form of articles, adjectives, and pronouns that accompany the noun. Unfortunately, there are no set rules for determining gender, so it's best to learn the gender of each noun as you go. However, there are some general tendencies:

• Most nouns ending in -o are masculine, such as "amico" (friend) and "libro" (book).
• Most nouns ending in -a are feminine, such as "casa" (house) and "lingua" (language).
• There are exceptions to these patterns, so it's essential to memorize the gender along with the noun.

Italian, like many languages, has irregular nouns that don't follow the regular patterns. These nouns may have irregular gender, irregular plurals, or both. Some common examples include "uomo" (man), which is masculine, and "mano" (hand), which is feminine.

Some nouns can take on the form of masculine or feminine, such as autore(M) and autrice(F). Usually these cases occur when a noun is a person's profession, such as: write, doctor, etc. or boy, girl, child etc. The noun, in this case will agree with the gender of the person it is referring to.

Pluralization

Italian nouns can be singular or plural. Making a noun plural usually involves changing the ending, although there are some irregular plural forms. Here are the general rules for forming plurals:

• Nouns ending in -o become -i in the plural, such as "amici" (friends) and "libri" (books).
• Nouns ending in -a become -e in the plural, such as "case" (houses) and "lingue" (languages).
• Nouns ending in -e can have different plural forms, such as "studente" (student) becoming "studenti" (students)
• Nouns ending with an accent such as "città" (city) remains "città" (cities).

Preserving Ending Sound
When pluralizing Italian words, it's important to preserve the ending sound of the word when pluralized. The following guide can be used:

• endswith "gio" replace with "gi"
• endswith "cio" replace with "ci"
• endswith "cia" replace with "ce"
• endswith "gia" replace with "ge"
• endswith "ca" replace with "chi"
• endswith "go" replace with "ghi"
• endswith "ca" replace with "che"
• endswith "ga" replace with "ghe"

Greek Endings
Italian borrows a few Greek words, which can be determined by their usual "ma" and "ta" endings, such as "problema". Greek words always defer to masculine and have their ending replaced with an "i".

Exceptions
Not every noun follows these rules. Here are the exceptions for the words used within our review and study decks.

Singular	Plural	English
uovo	uova	egg(s)
lenzuolo	lenzuola	sheet(s)
ala	ali	wing(s)
farmacia	farmacia	pharmacy(ies)
uomo	uomini	man|men
tempio	templi	temple(s)
labbro	labbra	lip(s)
dio	dei	god(s)
dito	dita	finger(s)
zio	zii	uncles(s)
signore	signori	gentleman(men)
signora	le signore	lady|ladies
problema	problemi	problem