Free Spanish Noun Gender Quiz: El or La

How the Spanish gender quiz works

Pick a set of nouns, and the quiz shows them one at a time with their English meaning. Tap el or la, or press 1 or 2 on a keyboard. The right answer appears at once, and Enter takes you to the next noun, so you can work through a set from the keyboard.

A running score stays on screen. If you'd rather see the Spanish noun on its own, hide the English meaning. When you reach the end, you can practice only the nouns you missed.

2,447 everyday Spanish nouns

We built the list from the nouns that come up most often in Spanish film and TV subtitles. Rare words, verb and adjective forms, slang and names came out. The rest was reviewed for everyday Spanish, and every noun that stayed got an English meaning. That left 2,447 nouns: 1,325 take el and 1,122 take la. Answering el every time would score about 54 percent, a little better than a coin toss.

You don't have to take all 2,447 at once. Choose a set of 100, 300 or 1,000 nouns, or all of them. Or choose the set of nouns whose ending gives the gender away, which comes with the exceptions to each rule.

What you see after each answer

Every answer comes back with the noun and its article. Where the plural isn't just the noun plus -s, you see that too: las ciudades, los lápices, las crisis.

Where the noun's ending is a rule, the quiz adds the rule and how often it holds: "Nouns ending in -dad are feminine: 1,487 of the 1,489 in our dictionary." Where the noun breaks the rule, it tells you that instead. For el día, it says: "An exception: nouns ending in -a are feminine (18,556 of the 19,206 in our dictionary), but not this one." El mapa, el tema and el planeta break the same rule.

Spanish noun gender practice by ending

The endings set holds only the nouns whose ending gives the gender away, plus the nouns that break each rule. Some of those rules are close to certain. In our dictionary, 1,487 of the 1,489 nouns ending in -dad are feminine, and 1,993 of the 1,999 ending in -or are masculine. Others are a lean and no more. In the dictionary, about 9 in 10 nouns in -e are masculine, yet la noche, la calle and la gente are feminine, and among the quiz's own everyday nouns the split is closer to 3 in 4. For an ending like that, the quiz says "most nouns" instead of stating a rule.

Because the exceptions come mixed in, you learn each rule together with the nouns it doesn't cover. La mano, la foto and la radio break the -o rule, for a start. The Spanish noun gender rules guide lists the rules with their counts and the everyday exceptions to learn first.

El agua and other feminine nouns that take el

The quiz asks for each noun's gender. Agua is feminine, so the answer is la, even though you say el agua. The answer line reads "el agua (feminine)" and adds a note: agua takes el and un in the singular because it starts with a stressed a, but the plural is las aguas, and an adjective stays feminine, as in el agua fría.

Other everyday nouns in the list work the same way: el arma, el alma, el hambre, el área, el ala, el ave, el águila, el hacha and el hada. The answer for each of them is la.

Nouns with two genders

Six nouns in the quiz take either gender with the same meaning: mar, internet, azúcar, chance, lente and pijama. For those, either answer counts, so you won't lose a point for the one you happened to learn.

Other nouns are spelled like a noun of the other gender, and the quiz has 49 of them. El capital is money and la capital is a capital city. El cura is a priest and la cura is a cure, while la mañana is the morning and el mañana the future. These always show their meaning, even when you've hidden the English, because the meaning decides the answer. When you meet one in a text, the Spanish gender checker shows both genders with their meanings, such as el orden and la orden, or el frente and la frente.

A quiz for practice, a checker for lookups

The quiz is for practice, one noun at a time. To look up the nouns from your own textbook, paste up to 100 at once into the Spanish gender checker and copy them back with their articles. To see why an ending decides the gender, and which nouns break each rule, read the Spanish noun gender rules. For the verbs in the same lesson, try the Spanish verb conjugation quiz or print the Spanish verb conjugation worksheets.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

Spanish nouns, genders and plurals come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). The quiz's nouns are chosen by their frequency in FrequencyWords (Hermit Dave, from OpenSubtitles 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0), and their English meanings are written for NexaProva.