I have written about compound nouns before in posts like Lost German compound nouns found after long search, Handschuhe – Gloves or Are you a ‘Muffel’? but I wrote them to show you the variety of compound nouns.
In this blog post I’m going to answer the question:
How do you determine the gender of a compound noun?
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As a reminder, compound nouns are words formed by joining two or more nouns together. In English, they are usually written as two or more words, but in German, they are written as one.
So what happens to the gender of those words?
Especially if the two words have a different gender?
Well, it’s the last noun that determines the gender.
If you have a word consisting of two or more words, have a look at the last one, and that will tell you what the gender is.
Let’s look at some examples.
Der Spiegel, the mirror. Das Ei, the egg. If you put those two together you get a mirror egg 😉
No, it’s a fried egg. And because it’s das Ei, it’s also das Spiegelei.
Another example, die Couch, which is a sofa, der Tisch, the table, put those two together and you get your coffee table. And as it’s der Tisch, it’s der Couchtisch.
One more: der Tee
Here I’m giving you two choices. Sometimes in Germany, you get your tea in a glass, and it’s das Glas. So therefore, it’s das Teeglas. If you have a tea in a cup, it’s die Tasse. Therefore it’s die Teetasse.
Both words begin with Tee, but it’s the last one that tells you. So basically, you add the two or more nouns together and the gender is the one of the last one.
But – you knew there would be a BUT!
Slight variations.
Some nouns need to be linked with either an ‘e’, an ‘en’, ‘es’, ‘n’ or ‘s’ and others may even lose some letters. That’s purely for pronunciation reasons. When we say those two words together, they still need to sound like one word.
So if we had the words Blume and Topf, and I tried to say that as one word, I would still need to take a breather. Try it: der Blumetopf. That doesn’t sound like one word. By adding the ‘n’ in there, I can make it flow: der Blumentopf.
Die Haltestelle, der Kochtopf. Both of those have as their first noun a verb that’s been turned into noun, halten and kochen. Die Haltenstelle, der Kochentopf – doesn’t sound very good, does it? Get rid of the ‘e’ or the ‘en’ and you can say those words as one word: die Haltestelle, der Kochtopf.
But you will probably find that a lot of them are linked with an ‘s’.
Like Geburtstagskarte. There are actually three words here, Geburt which is birth, Tag, which is day and Karte is your card. So this is a birthday card. If you said that without the ‘s’ you would have to say die Geburttagkarte. That doesn’t sound like one word, but die Geburtstagskarte does.
And just to show you again that it is the last word that gives you the gender. The following three words all begin with Geburt, but because one is a card, the other one a cake, the last one the present, they all have different genders. It’s die Geburtstagskarte, der Geburtstagskuchen, das Geburtstagsgeschenk.
So from now on, if you come across a really long German word, break it up into individual words. Remember the ‘s’ may not be part of that word. And you probably can work out what the word is and also what the gender is.
This blog post and the following video has been taken from my online course German gender #1 – German nouns and der, die & das. Check it out if you wish to learn more. And if you like and want to buy it, use the coupon code BLOG to get 10% off.
Alternatively, if you prefer books to videos, you’ll find this and lots more in my book German Gender – Is it der, die or das? which you buy as paperback or kindle.
And just to finish this post, here’s a very quick explanation: