Singular and Plural

Making a Croatian noun plural is, for the basic forms, refreshingly mechanical: each gender has one default nominative-plural ending, and you swap it in. This page teaches that swap — the form you use for "the cities are big" or "I have two books" in the simplest counting — and then delivers the warning that saves learners months of confusion: Croatian "plural" is not one form. The nominative plural you learn here is only the subject-form plural. After numbers, and in every case other than the nominative, the noun shifts again. Get the nominative plural solid first; this page builds that floor and points to where the rest lives.

The three default plural endings

Look at the gender, and the nominative plural follows from it. Masculine nouns take -i, feminine nouns take -e, neuter nouns take -a.

The logic is clean once you see what is being replaced. Feminine and neuter nouns end in a vowel in the singular (-a, -o, -e), and the plural simply substitutes its own vowel for that ending: žena → žen-e, selo → sel-a, more → mor-a. Masculine nouns end in a consonant, so the plural adds the vowel -i to the bare stem: prijatelj → prijatelj-i.

Masculine monosyllables grow an infix

Here is the first wrinkle, and it is a big one because it hits the most common short masculine words. Many one-syllable masculine nouns do not just add -i — they insert a chunk, -ov- or -ev-, between the stem and the ending. The result is a "long plural."

Note that kralj and muž take -ev-, not -ov-: the choice depends on whether the stem ends in a "soft" consonant. That conditioning, the lists of which monosyllables do and do not take the infix (because some, like dan → dani and konj → konji, simply add -i), and the fact that the infix appears in every plural case — all of that is the subject of its own page: the -ov-/-ev- plural infix. For now, just register that "city" is gradovi, not gradi.

A fleeting vowel can vanish in the plural

A small but high-frequency group of masculine nouns has an -a- in the last syllable of the singular that drops out when an ending is added. The classic example is otac ("father"): its stem is really oc-/oč-, and the -a- only appears to break up the final consonant cluster in the bare nominative singular. Add any ending and the -a- disappears.

So otac combines two effects at once: the fleeting -a- drops and the noun takes the -ev- long plural, giving očevi (with c → č before the soft infix). This "fleeting -a-" runs throughout the case system, not just the plural; it gets full treatment on the fleeting-a page. Flag it here so psi ("dogs") and očevi ("fathers") don't look like typos.

Two plurals you cannot derive: ljudi and djeca

Two of the most frequent nouns in the language have plurals you simply cannot predict from the singular. They are suppletive — the plural comes from a different root altogether, exactly like English person → people or go → went.

Čovjek ("a person, a human") has no regular plural in normal use; "people" is always ljudi. And dijete ("child") does not pluralise as *djete- anything — "children" is djeca, a collective noun that grammatically behaves like a feminine singular (you say djeca su "the children are", but adjectives agree in the feminine singular: mala djeca "small children"). The strangeness of djeca is covered on the collective nouns page, and the stem-extending behaviour of dijete itself on the neuter t-/n-stem page.

Agreement: number spreads outward

Just as gender does, number controls agreement. When a noun goes plural, its adjectives go plural, and a present-tense verb takes its plural ending. A past-tense participle, which already changes for gender, also changes for number.

This is why number, like gender, is not an afterthought — see adjective agreement basics. The whole noun phrase moves together.

The crucial warning: "plural" is not one form

Now the insight that English speakers most need. In English, book → books gives you one plural that works everywhere: "two books," "I have books," "with the books." The -s never changes. Croatian does not work this way. The nominative plural you have just learned (knjige, gradovi, sela) is only the subject form — what you use when the plural noun is doing something in the sentence.

The moment you put a number in front, or change the case, the noun shifts to a different form. Two things to know now:

• After 2, 3, 4 (and 22, 23, 24, 102…), Croatian uses a special counting form — historically a dual, called the paucal — which is not the nominative plural. "Two books" is dvije knjige, "two cities" is dva grada (looks singular-ish!), not *dva gradovi.
• After 5 and above, the noun takes yet another form, the genitive plural: "five books" is pet knjiga, "five cities" is pet gradova.

So when you count, do not reach for the nominative plural by reflex. The number decides the form. This is one of the genuine hurdles of Croatian, and it is handled in full on numeral government and the genitive plural. The takeaway for now: the nominative plural is the subject-form plural, and counting is a separate machine.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Default nominative plurals by gender: masculine -i (prijatelji), feminine -e (žene), neuter -a (sela).
• Many short masculine nouns insert the -ov-/-ev- long-plural infix (grad → gradovi, muž → muževi) — its own page.
• Watch the fleeting -a- (otac → očevi, pas → psi) and the two suppletive plurals (čovjek → ljudi, dijete → djeca).
• Number drives agreement of adjectives and verbs, just like gender.
• The big one: the nominative plural is only the subject form. After numbers and in other cases the noun shifts — 2–4 take the paucal, 5+ take the genitive plural. Never count with the bare nominative plural.