If you speak Spanish, Galician words like leite and ponte cost you nothing. You recognize them on sight. The part you get wrong is the little word in front: la leche is o leite, and el puente is a ponte. The noun is familiar, so the Spanish article comes out before you think about it.
There aren’t many of these words, which is the good news. Here are 28 of the most common. Every Galician gender below is checked against the dictionary of the Real Academia Galega.
Words ending in -axe are feminine
Spanish -aje words are masculine. Their Galician twins in -axe are feminine. This one is a rule rather than a list, so it also covers -axe words you haven’t met yet.
| Español | Galego | |
|---|---|---|
| el viaje | a viaxe | trip |
| el mensaje | a mensaxe | message |
| el paisaje | a paisaxe | landscape |
| el equipaje | a equipaxe | luggage |
| el maquillaje | a maquillaxe | makeup |
| el tatuaje | a tatuaxe | tattoo |
| el coraje | a coraxe | courage |
Three common words don’t follow the rule and stay masculine: o traxe (suit), o garaxe (garage) and o paxe (page, the servant).
Four -or words are feminine
| Español | Galego | |
|---|---|---|
| el color | a cor | color |
| el dolor | a dor | pain |
| el calor | a calor | heat |
| el sudor | a suor | sweat |
Don’t stretch this one into a rule. Most -or words are masculine in both languages: o amor, o valor, o terror.
Feminine in Spanish, masculine in Galician
| Español | Galego | |
|---|---|---|
| la leche | o leite | milk |
| la sangre | o sangue | blood |
| la sal | o sal | salt |
| la miel | o mel | honey |
| la nariz | o nariz | nose |
| la cárcel | o cárcere | prison |
| la señal | o sinal | sign, signal |
| la costumbre | o costume | habit, custom |
| la cumbre | o cume | summit |
| la legumbre | o legume | legume |
Masculine in Spanish, feminine in Galician
| Español | Galego | |
|---|---|---|
| el árbol | a árbore | tree |
| el puente | a ponte | bridge |
| el origen | a orixe | origin |
| el análisis | a análise | analysis |
| el fraude | a fraude | fraud |
| el fantasma | a pantasma | ghost |
| el canal | a canle | channel |
A note on canle: it’s the word for a TV channel and for most channels of water. Galician also has o canal, masculine like Spanish, for large man-made waterways.
The gender carries through the sentence
Changing the article isn’t the whole job. Adjectives and pronouns follow the noun’s gender too:
- La leche está fría → O leite está frío.
- El puente es viejo → A ponte é vella.
- La sal está en la mesa. ¿Me la pasas? → O sal está na mesa. Pásasmo? The pronoun is masculine too: mo is me + o.
Two that look like changes but aren’t
El agua and el hambre are feminine in Spanish. The el is only there because the word starts with a stressed a, and the adjectives give it away: el agua fría, mucha hambre. Galician a auga and a fame are feminine too, so nothing changes.
How to make them stick
Learn every noun together with its article, not as a bare word. Leite on its own teaches you nothing about gender. O leite does.
In Verba, these pairs are on one screen: Gender Changes, in the Study tab, sorted alphabetically so you can check a word quickly. Every dictionary entry also shows the gender for each language, and if you add your own words with a gender in each language, any new pair joins the list by itself.
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