German Nouns

German Nouns

A German noun has one of three genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. It belongs to one of a number of declension classes, only partly correlated with gender. Grammatical gender influences articles, adjectives and pronouns. A noun's gender is not necessarily consistent with the sex of the entity referred to by the noun (e.g. the word for "girl" is neuter, while "tree" is masculine).

Number (singular, plural) and case (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) must be taken into account in the process of declension.

The declension can be more difficult than in some other languages such as Latin: not only the word ending, but also the root may be altered by inflection.

• Der Mann (sg.) - Die Männer (pl.) ("the man" - "the men")

As in English, some nouns (mass nouns) only have a singular form (singularia tantum); other nouns only have a plural form (pluralia tantum):

• Das All, der Durst, der Sand ("the Universe", "thirst", "sand")
• Die Kosten, die Ferien ("costs", "the holidays")

Traps abound in both directions here: common mass nouns in English are not mass nouns in German, and vice versa:

• information — Information, die Information ("the piece of information")

"die Informationen" ("the pieces of information")

• the police are (pl.) = die Polizei ist (sg.)

Again as in English, some words change their meaning when changing their number:

• Geld ("money") - Gelder ("different sources of money")
• Wein ("wine") - die Weine ("different types of wine")

A few words have two different plurals with distinct meanings. For example:

Wort ("word") - Wörter (isolated words, as in "five words") - Worte (connected, meaningful words, as in "his last words")

• Band - Bande ("bonds") - Bänder ("ribbons")