German articles: der, die, das chart and the gender rules

German has three genders, and every noun belongs to one: der Tisch (masculine), die Tür (feminine), das Fenster (neuter). The article then changes with the noun's job in the sentence, across four cases. This page gives the full chart of definite and indefinite articles, then the gender rules that actually predict der, die or das — each tested against the 1,485 nouns with a gender in our German word list. The short version: some endings are right every time we could check them, and they are worth learning; but only 44% of those nouns fall under any rule at all, so for most nouns the article has to be learned with the word.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 6 min read

The der, die, das chart

The definite article ("the")

The indefinite article ("a") and kein ("no, not a")

Kein takes the same endings as ein in the singular — kein Mann, keine Frau, kein Kind — and, unlike ein, it has a plural. Three things the chart does not show but you need with it:

• Masculine and neuter nouns add -s or -es in the genitive: des Mannes, des Kindes, des Autos.
• Nouns add -n in the dative plural if they do not already end in -n or -s: mit den Kindern, in den Häusern, but mit den Autos.
• Only the masculine changes in the accusative. Feminine, neuter and plural look the same as the nominative, which is why den is the form that gives a learner away most often.

Which articles you will actually hear

Some forms are far more frequent than others. Here are all twelve, ranked by how often they are said in German film and television dialogue:

Read the table with one caution: der, die and das are also pronouns. Das is "that" (das ist gut), and die and der are "who, which" and "that one", so their counts are higher than their use as articles alone. Together the six definite forms are 5.7% of every word said.

How often a guess is right

Before any rule, the baseline. Of the 1,485 nouns in our list, 43% are der, 37% are die and 20% are das. Guessing der every time is right less than half the time; a rule has to beat that to be worth learning.

The gender rules, tested

Each rule below was checked against every noun in our list that it applies to. "Right in our list" is how many of those nouns follow the rule; the exceptions are named.

Some counts are small — our list has only a handful of nouns ending in -ling or -ist — so treat a perfect score on five nouns as "no exception found" rather than as proof. The rules themselves are the ones German grammars give, and the larger samples bear them out.

The rules you can trust

• -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -ion, -tät, -ik are feminine. die Zeitung, die Freiheit, die Möglichkeit, die Freundschaft, die Nation, die Universität, die Musik. Not one exception among the nouns we tested. (Sprung, "jump", ends in -ung without having the suffix, and is masculine.)
• A woman or female animal in -in is feminine: die Lehrerin, die Freundin, die Königin.
• A noun made from a verb with -er is masculine: der Lehrer, der Fahrer, der Spieler, and the machines that do something: der Fernseher, der Wecker.
• A verb used as a noun is neuter: das Essen, das Leben, das Wiedersehen (as in auf Wiedersehen).
• -chen and -lein make a diminutive, which is always neuter — even for people: das Mädchen ("the girl"), das Fräulein. The two exceptions in our list, der Kuchen and der Knochen, are not diminutives at all.
• A compound takes the gender of its last part: das Haus, so das Krankenhaus; der Tag, so der Geburtstag; die Karte, so die Kreditkarte. This was right for 102 of the 103 compounds we found; the one exception, das Gegenteil, ends in a word that is itself sometimes das.

The rule that is right most of the time

• Nouns ending in -e are usually feminine: die Lampe, die Straße, die Woche. It held for 86% of the nouns we tested — good enough to guess with, not good enough to stop checking. The exceptions come in groups: masculine nouns for people and animals (der Name, der Junge, der Kollege, der Löwe), neuter nouns that begin with Ge- (das Gebäude, das Gemüse), loanwords (der Kaffee, der Tee, der Code), and a few common neuters to learn one by one: das Ende, das Auge, das Interesse.

The ones with real exceptions

• -or is masculine (der Doktor, der Motor), but das Tor ("gate, goal") and das Labor.
• -ment is neuter (das Dokument, das Instrument), but der Moment.
• -nis is mostly neuter (das Ergebnis, das Geheimnis), but die Erlaubnis.
• -ur is mostly feminine (die Natur, die Kultur), but people are masculine: der Regisseur, der Gouverneur.

So how should you learn gender?

Learn every noun with its article — der Tisch, not Tisch — because more than half of German nouns fall under no rule at all. Tisch, Tür and Fenster end in nothing that predicts anything. Then use the reliable endings above to stop worrying about the nouns they cover: every -ung, every -heit, every -chen is settled the moment you see it, and every compound is settled by its last noun.

Cases and genders are the core of what makes German hard, and the reason German needs more words than its neighbours for 95% coverage is its compounds, which the last rule above makes a little kinder. The German course teaches German from its frequency list, one lesson a day, and the 1,000 most common German words give every noun its gender. The longest of those compounds have a post of their own.

Sources

• Wikipedia: German declension and Grammatical gender in German, for the article tables and the suffix rules.
• Duden, Die Grammatik (Duden vol. 4), on noun gender and declension.
• Verbavia's German word list, for the genders the rules are tested on. The test is german_genders in scripts/frequency_extras.py; the words it excludes by hand — ones that end in a suffix's letters without having the suffix — are listed there with the reason.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org; Dave, H. FrequencyWords (OpenSubtitles 2018), CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com, for the article frequencies.