The most common genders are called masculine and feminine, while some Spanish pronouns are considered to have neutral gender. A few nouns are said to be of "ambiguous" gender, meaning that they are sometimes treated as masculine and sometimes as feminine. Additionally, the terms "common gender" and "epicene gender" are used to classify ways in which grammatical gender interacts with "natural gender". Many adjectives ending in -a may be masculine or feminine, while adjectives ending in -o are almost always masculine.
Masculine
The masculine : As a general rule, nouns ending in -o and nouns which refer to males are masculine. Exceptionally, mano is feminine. Also some colloquial shortened forms of feminine nouns end with -o: la foto, la disco, la moto, la radio.
Feminine
The feminine : As a general rule, nouns ending in -a and nouns which refer to females are feminine. Similarly, the endings -ción, -sión, -dad, -tad, and -umbre indicate feminine gender. Exceptionally, día, mapa and sofá are masculine. Likewise, nouns of Greek origin ending in -ma or "-ta" are masculine.
Neuter
The neuter : The pronoun ello and the demonstrative pronounsesto, eso, and aquello are said to have neuter gender because they do not have a gendered noun as their antecedent, but rather refer to a whole idea, a clause, or an object that has not been named in the discourse. The neuter article lo, is not used with nouns, since there are no neuter nouns. It is used with adjectives to create abstract "nouns": lo bueno, the good part ; lo importante, what is important. Contrast el bueno/la buena, the good person or thing.
Common
"Common gender" is the term applied to those nouns, referring to persons, that keep the same form regardless of the sex of the person, but which change their grammatical gender. For example, el violinista, la violinista, el mártir, la mártir, el testigo, la testigo, el espía, la espía, etc. To this gender belongpresent participles derived from active verbs and used as nouns, such as el estudiante, la estudiante, el atacante, la atacante, el presidente, la presidente, etc.
Epicene
"Epicene gender" is the term applied to those nouns that have only one grammatical gender, masculine or feminine, but can refer to a living creature of either sex. Most animal names are of this type. E.g.: el ratón, la rata, la rana, la comadreja, la liebre, la hormiga, el búho, el escarabajo, el buitre, el delfín, el cóndor, la paloma, la llama. To specify sex, a modifying word is added, with no change of gender: el delfín macho, el delfín hembra, la comadreja macho, la comadreja hembra.
Ambiguous
Ambiguous nouns whose grammatical gender varies in usage are said to be of "ambiguous" gender. Often the change of gender brings about a change of connotation. E.g.: el mar, la mar, el calor, la calor, el azúcar, la azúcar.
Changes
In the recent history of the Spanish language, there is a unidirectional tendency for words with unusual gender to be regularized by analogy to other words of their class. For example, in some Spanish dialects, la tribu, which is the only word ending in -u to be feminine, has been changed to el tribo. The word idioma, which is masculine in standard Spanish, has become feminine in some dialects.
Feminism
Some feminist movements and ideologies have criticized certain grammatical rules in Spanish which use grammatically-masculine forms rather than grammatically-feminine forms. These include the grammatical custom of using a grammatically-masculine plural for a group containing at least one biological male; the use of the masculine definite article for infinitives ; and the permissibility of using Spanish male pronouns for female referents but not vice versa. There also exist solely-masculine apocope forms, del, algún and buen ) simply due to inherited tendencies in phonology and morphology. Some early proposals for gender neutrality in Spanish have included extending the use of the gender-neutral -es ending for plural nouns, so that mis hijos. Sometimes even feminist proposals can be constructed as sexist. ' is a neologism formed from and the Latin to mean "single-parent". It has been occasionally analyzed as too similar to , causing the coining of ' to mean "single-mother".
