Gender of nouns in the nominative singular

In Serbian every noun belongs to one of three groups: masculine, feminine or neuter. This is not about whether the thing is alive or has a sex — a window, a book and a mirror all get a group too. Serbian calls these groups genders, and each noun has exactly one.

The good news: you can almost always see which group a noun is in just by looking at its last letter, in the plain dictionary form (the form you see on a vocabulary card).

The three endings

So prozor ends in the consonant r and is masculine. Knjiga ends in -a and is feminine. Ogledalo ends in -o and is neuter. Nothing else has to be memorised for the great majority of nouns.

Why it matters

Right now the gender changes nothing in the sentence: Prozor je ovde, Knjiga je ovde, Ogledalo je ovde all look the same. But almost every word that later describes a noun — my, this, big, new — will change its ending to match. Learning the gender together with the word now costs nothing and saves a lot later.

Learn each new noun with its ending in mind, not as a bare translation: knjiga, feminine, -a. That one habit makes the next few lessons easy.

A few nouns break the rule

Two small groups do not follow the endings, and you should recognise them rather than drill them.

• Words for men that end in -a are masculine anyway: tata (dad), deda (grandpa). The meaning wins over the ending.
• A number of feminine nouns end in a consonant: noć (night), stvar (thing). These have to be learned one by one.

Do not try to guess these two groups from the shape of the word — there is nothing to see. Everything else follows the table above.