Rod
Masculine, feminine and neuter
Every Croatian noun has a rod (gender): masculine, feminine or neuter. The gender determines how adjectives and verbs change to match the word, so it is important to learn it right away. Luckily, you can usually tell the gender of a word simply from its last letter.
Ends in a consonant
- stol (table)
- grad (city)
- kruh (bread)
Ends in -a
- kuća (house)
- voda (water)
- knjiga (book)
Ends in -o, or in -e after a soft letter
- selo (village)
- pismo (letter)
- srce (heart)
For neuter words, -o is the standard ending. But if the stem of the word ends in one of the "soft" letters below, it always becomes -e, as in srce (heart, stem ends in c) and polje (field, stem ends in lj).
There are also a few real exceptions. tata (dad), for example, is masculine even though it ends in -a. Words like noć (night) are feminine, even though they end in a consonant. And more (sea) ends in -e without its stem ending in a soft letter; that comes from the older form morje. It is best to simply learn those words by heart.