How to gender a noun

Well, it's a little more sophisticated - an reliable - than ball gazing but there's always a margin of error. As with the page on predicting plurals and and genitives this is work in progress.

The following pointers range from fairly reliable rules through to rough guidelines.

As with plurals, irregular nouns are just that, irregular, so you need to learn those. The ones you should learn off as soon as possible are: athair, bean, bó, bràthair, brù, cù, deoch, Dia, druim, duine, Éirinn, fear, fuil, leabaidh, mac, muir, piuthar, sgian, taigh, talamh. There are lots more, but those will do for starters.

Best bets

Your best bets are special endings (in the nominative singular) which often come with specific genders. As these are the most reliable rules, if there is such an ending, you should go with the rules for that special ending in preference to the more generic rules further down.

-(e)achd

For this rule to work, you have to count syllables. The rules is that words ending in achd which are only one syllable long are generally masculine, if they have more than one, they're generally feminine. Especially with one-syllable words, there are several which are feminine in certain dialects, possibly because there are more of the longer, feminine ones so it may be people are over-generalising the pattern. Still, as a rule it's fairly reliable.

Masculine

• achd
• feachd
• reachd

Feminine

• éifeachd
• sèimheachd
• fosgailteachd

Pitfall Some multi-syllable words ending in -ac have common mis-spellings with achd. These mis-spellings do not follow the above pattern.

• currachd should be currac (masc.)