Is mer masculine or feminine in French?
Mer (the sea) is feminine: la mer, une mer, plural les mers. Adjectives agree in the feminine: la mer Méditerranée, une mer calme. The difficulty is not really the gender — it is that mer sounds identical to two other words with different genders.
How is mer different from maire and mère?
French has three common homophones all pronounced the same way: la mer (the sea, feminine), le maire (the mayor, masculine), and la mère (the mother, feminine). They sound alike but are spelled differently and are not interchangeable. Only context and spelling tell them apart: la mer est bleue versus le maire de la ville versus ma mère travaille. For writing, this is where accurate spelling matters most — an examiner reading le mer or la maire sees a clear error. Fixing these homophones is one of the fastest ways to make written French look controlled and precise.
How do you use mer in a sentence?
These keep mer in its feminine sea sense:
Preply
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- La mer est calme aujourd’hui. (The sea is calm today.)
- Nous passons nos vacances au bord de la mer. (We spend our holidays at the seaside.)
- Les mers du globe se réchauffent. (The world’s seas are warming.)
The mistake learners make with mer
The trap is not gender guessing but homophone confusion: writing le mer (mixing in the masculine of le maire) or spelling it mère. The sea is la mer, feminine, no accent on the e. Keep the trio straight — la mer, le maire, la mère — and both the spelling and the gender fall into place.
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 mer is never a guess again.
