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.