Is main masculine or feminine in French?
Main is feminine: la main, une main, plural les mains. Adjectives agree in the feminine: la main droite, une main ouverte. It is worth memorising deliberately, because ending in a consonant sound makes many learners assume it is masculine.
Why is main feminine when it ends in a consonant?
There is a loose intuition that nouns ending in a pronounced or written consonant are masculine, and that vowel-ending nouns are feminine. Body parts break that intuition constantly: la main (hand), la dent (tooth) and la jambe (leg) are feminine, while le bras (arm), le pied (foot) and le doigt (finger) are masculine. There is no reliable rule for body parts — you learn each with its article. Main comes from the Latin feminine manus and kept that gender. Because it appears in many fixed expressions, learning it correctly pays off across a lot of everyday French.
How do you use main in a sentence?
These include two very common set phrases:
Preply
Apprendre une langue avec un tuteur en ligne
- Elle lève la main pour poser une question. (She raises her hand to ask a question.)
- Ils se donnent la main. (They hold hands.)
- J’ai le livre sous la main. (I have the book at hand.)
The mistake learners make with main
The usual slip is un main or masculine agreement (le main gauche). It is feminine: la main gauche, une main froide. Group it with the other feminine body parts — la main, la dent, la jambe — so the pattern sticks together rather than word by word.
When you are unsure of any noun’s gender while writing — in a TCF message, a DELF letter, or everyday French — verify it before you commit it to the page. The French Gender Checker returns the correct article, the plural, and the rule behind the gender for any noun in a single lookup, so a word like main is never a guess again.
