Every Hindi noun has a gender — how to guess it right

Every Hindi noun is either masculine or feminine — there is no neuter, so even objects have a gender. Most nouns ending in -आ are masculine (लड़का a boy, कमरा a room), and most ending in -ई are feminine (लड़की a girl, कुर्सी a chair). The gender then controls the adjectives and verbs around the noun, which is why guessing wrong is audible across the whole sentence.

English speakers find this arbitrary, and it partly is. But unlike French or German, Hindi gives you a usable rule that covers most of the vocabulary, and the exceptions are a short list rather than a lifetime of memorisation.

The two endings that do most of the work

Nouns ending in a consonant could be either and simply have to be learned: घर (house) is masculine, किताब (book) is feminine, and nothing in the shape of the word tells you.

Why it matters: everything else agrees

The gender is not decoration. Adjectives ending in -आ change form, and so does the verb.

Adjectives that do not end in -आ never change. साफ़ (clean), मुश्किल (difficult) and सुंदर (beautiful) look identical in both columns. Only the -आ class inflects, which cuts the work down considerably.

The exceptions worth knowing now

A handful of extremely common words break the -आ and -ई rule. They are common enough that you will meet them in your first week, so learn them as exceptions rather than deriving them.

पिता (father) ends in -आ and is masculine, which looks like an exception to the exception. It is not — it simply follows the main rule while माता does not.

Borrowed words get a gender too

English nouns used in Hindi are assigned a gender by convention, and speakers agree on it without ever having been taught. There is no rule; there is just usage.

Vehicles skew feminine, probably because गाड़ी — the native word for a vehicle — is feminine and the borrowed words fell in behind it. That is a pattern rather than a rule, but it guesses right often enough to be useful.

Plurals depend on the gender as well

Masculine nouns that do not end in -आ look identical in the plural — एक घर and दस घर use the same word. The verb is what tells you: घर है for one, घर हैं for many.

How to actually handle this

• Learn every new noun with an adjective attached — not कुर्सी but बड़ी कुर्सी. The gender comes along for free.
• Apply the -आ and -ई rule by default. It is right far more often than it is wrong.
• Memorise the six exceptions above. They cover most of what you will actually trip over.
• For English loanwords, listen for what people say rather than reasoning about it.
• When you are unsure, use an adjective that does not inflect. सुंदर works for anything.

Noun gender is a different mechanism from the one that changes verbs with the speaker. This page is about the gender of the thing; the other guide is about the gender of whoever is talking. Both can operate in the same sentence.