Loanwords: Gender, Plural and Spelling

Hebrew takes in foreign words at a rate no committee can keep up with, and the moment one arrives it has to be handed two things it did not come with: a gender and a plural. Speakers rely on strong defaults, which means you can usually absorb a new word into Hebrew on first contact — but the defaults still yield to an established lexical form. How the word is spelled is a separate craft, and it has its own pages: spelling foreign words for the letter choices and the geresh for ג׳, צ׳ and ז׳.

Gender: masculine unless it arrived with an /a/

An ordinary inanimate loanword is masculine by default. If its shape supplies no feminine cue, it lands on the unmarked gender. Loans for people can instead follow natural gender and build a feminine counterpart, so apply this page's shortcut to things and concepts, not blindly to a person's title.

The exception is a loan whose own final syllable happens to sound like Hebrew's feminine ending ־ָה. Hebrew hears its own morphology in it and files the word as feminine — no decision required, no metaphor about pizzas being feminine. The ending does the work.

Hebrew Wiktionary's מין field records exactly this: זכר for אינטרנט, אוטובוס, טלפון and סטודנט; נקבה for פיצה, אוניברסיטה, גיטרה and בננה.

The trap is that the test is about the sound, not the letter. קָפֶה ends in a ה on the page and is nevertheless masculine — because what it ends in is an /e/, not an /a/, and only /a/ triggers the feminine reading. Hebrew Wiktionary tags it זכר.

Plural: Hebrew endings only

The same defaults normally decide the plural: masculine loans take ־ִים, while the ־ָה loans drop that ending and take ־וֹת. As with native nouns, an established lexical plural can override what the gender would lead you to predict.

The last row of that table is the one to memorise, because an א appears: אוניברסיטאות, not the אוניברסיטות a learner builds by the ordinary ־ָה rule. This plural retains the stem's final /a/ and separates it from ־וֹת with א; most /a/-final loans instead drop that vowel, as פיצה and גיטרה do. The same spelling strategy appears on the masculine side when a vowel-final stem is retained: *סטודיו gives סטודיואים. A Hebrew Wikipedia insource:/…/ regex search on 21 August 2026 returns roughly 8,973 articles for אוניברסיטאות against 7 for אוניברסיטות — the first figure is a floor rather than a count at that size, but the ratio is not in doubt.

Productive pluralisation is Hebrew, not English. A singular such as לינק takes Hebrew ־ים, which is why a fluent Israeli writes לינקים rather than using English links as its plural. Two things make this less obvious than it sounds. First, לינקס does exist in Hebrew — as the lynx, and as the golf term — so the wrong intended form is not a nonsense string, merely a different word. Second, a handful of English forms containing -s were borrowed whole and reanalysed as Hebrew singular or mass nouns: צ׳יפְּס, ג׳ִינְס and קוֹמִיקְס. ג׳ינס can then form its own Hebrew plural ג׳ינסים when you mean several pairs.

Stress: learn it with the word

Hebrew stresses the final syllable by default. Loanwords are the largest hole in that default, and they do not patch it in one direction: many preserve non-final stress from the language or route through which they entered, while others have final stress. The result is lexical, so learn the stress with each word.

This is worth more attention than it looks, because misplaced stress is immediately salient. An Israeli hearing telefón registers it at once. The wider stress system, and the ❌ that names this exact error, are on stressing the wrong syllable.

The Hebrew word, or the loan?

The Academy of the Hebrew Language answers a new foreign word by coining a Hebrew one. What courses never teach is that the coinages have wildly different fates, and knowing which is which is ordinary Israeli competence.

Sometimes the Hebrew word wins outright and the loan simply dies. מַחְשֵׁב displaced computer so completely that קומפיוטר now reads as a period detail: the same Wikipedia search gives roughly 30,398 articles for מחשב against 35 for קומפיוטר. מַזְגָן and מַדְפֶּסֶת are in the same position.

Sometimes the Hebrew word remains markedly rarer than the loan. In 2003 the Academy approved מִרְשֶׁתֶת, built on רֶשֶׁת "net", for internet. Ordinary speakers overwhelmingly use אינטרנט: 268 Hebrew Wikipedia articles contain מרשתת against a floor of roughly 57,506 for אינטרנט, and many of the rarer form's hits are pages discussing the term or the Academy. In ordinary conversation מרשתת therefore sounds conspicuously purist or playful rather than neutral.

And sometimes the two live side by side with the loan ahead: מִסְרוֹן against סמס runs about 288 to 2,605.

Common Mistakes

1. Masculine agreement on a ־ָה loan. You have learned that loanwords are masculine, and then Hebrew quietly reclassifies the ones ending in /a/.

2. A masculine plural on a feminine loan. The same misclassification, one step further on.

3. Building אוניברסיטה's plural by the rule. The alef is not predictable from anything; it has to be learned with the word.

4. Choosing the wrong one of a real pair. Nothing here is ungrammatical — both sentences below are correct Hebrew, and only one of them is what an Israeli would actually say.

Key Takeaways

• An ordinary inanimate loanword is masculine by default, while final /a/ is a powerful feminine cue: אינטרנט, אוטובוס, קונצרט against פיצה, טלוויזיה, אוניברסיטה, גיטרה.
• The test is the sound, not the letter — קפה ends in ה and is masculine, because the vowel is /e/.
• The large learned ־צְיָה/־זְיָה family is feminine: אינפלציה, קואליציה, סיטואציה.
• Productive plurals use Hebrew endings: לינקים, אוטובוסים; פיצות, גיטרות. A few English -s forms, including צ׳יפס, ג׳ינס and קומיקס, were borrowed whole and reanalysed.
• אוניברסיטה gives אוניברסיטאות, retaining its final /a/ before ־וֹת and separating the vowels with א (roughly 8,973 to 7 in Hebrew Wikipedia); vowel-final סטודיו gives סטודיואים by the same spelling strategy.
• Loanwords are the big exception to final stress, and they do not go one way: télefon, ótobus, ínternet, universíta — but studént, kontsért, festivál. Stress is lexical and often reflects the route by which the word entered Hebrew.
• Academy replacements have individual fates: מחשב beat קומפיוטר about 30,398 to 35, while מרשתת lost to אינטרנט about 268 to 57,506. There is no rule; there is only which one you hear.