A few things about nouns and gender. First of all, the traditional definition of a noun is a person, place or thing. Another word for noun is substantive. When you are using a bilingual dictionary and you search for a word, at times the letter "n" or "s" may be used to let you know that the word you searched is a noun, or substantive. Second, each noun in Spanish has two qualities which you must know, specifically number and gender. Number refers to how many of these nouns there are. If there is only one, the noun is singular. If there are two or more the noun is plural. What do we mean by gender? The term gender defines classification according to sex. For example, in animals there are two classifications, female and male. In Spanish each noun is awarded a gender, either feminine or masculine. These qualities do not have any correlation to the user and it is always a good idea to learn the gender of a noun along with the vocabulary. When you are using a bilingual dictionary and you search for a word, at times the letter "f" or "m" may be used to let you know that the word you searched is either feminine or masculine. An example would be the following. You look up the word "house" in a good dictionary and you might see: n. casa, f. N means that it is a nouns, casa is the Spanish translation and f tells you that the noun is feminine. The easiest way to remember the gender of a word at first glance is that typically nouns that end in the letters "o", "or" "ma"and "pa"" tend to be masculine and nouns that end in "a" , "dad", "ión" and "umbre" tend to be feminine. There are many exceptions to this rule and you should always double check with a good dictionary. There are also words that end in letters other than those listed here. Always consult a dictionary. In this practice exercise, select the correct gender for the following words.