Thematic Vocabulary
Gender: Nouns and Articles
To understand the gender of nouns, it is first important to understand what a noun is. In elementary school you probably learned that a noun is a person, place or thing. Technically, a noun is a word that represents a person, place, or thing. When a word represents a person, the gender of that noun will obviously be the gender (sex) of the person it represents.
However, in Spanish, any noun that represents any object will have gender. It is not that the object the word represents is either male or female, but rather that the word itself is either a masculine or feminine word. For example, one word for computer, la computadora, is feminine and another word for computer is masculine: el ordenador. Television can be represented by a feminine word, la televisión, or by a masculine word, el televisor.
