Study Resource: Gender of nouns referring to animals

In many cases, nouns for animals in Brazilian Portuguese follow general rule for the gender of nouns for living beings:

• The word for a male animal is grammatically masculine and ends in -o

• The word for a female animal is grammatically feminine and ends in -a

Here’s an example:

Here are more examples that work like this:

However, there are also some special cases. Let’s check them!

• Some nouns for animals use different stems for the males vs. females:

  Masculine	Feminine
  boi ox	vaca cow
  cavalo horse	égua mare
  galo rooster	galinha hen
  tigre tiger	tigresa tigress

• Some nouns only have a grammatically masculine form, that is used for both males and females.

  Grammatically Masculine
  canguru kangaroo
  esquilo squirrel
  golfinho dolphin
  morcego bat
  pássaro bird
  tubarão shark

• Some nouns only have a grammatically feminine form, that is used for both males and females.

  Grammatically Feminine
  abelha bee
  baleia whale
  foca seal
  girafa giraffe
  tartaruga turtle
  zebra zebra

But if the noun for an animal is always grammatically masculine or always grammatically feminine, how do you make the distinction between male and female animals? In this case, it’s just like English! Add the words macho(male) or fêmea(female), like this:

Notice that, In the examples above, the article stays the same as the gender of the noun, not the gender of the animal, because the article agreesNo definition set for agreesLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. with the grammatical gender of the noun.