Lesson 1.4: Plural Nouns and Adjective Agreement

Plural nouns

We’ll take the first half of this lesson to talk about the ways nouns can be made plural in Spanish. Like in English, there’s a rule that will work for most nouns as well as a few special rules that you have the option to learn.

Just like in English, the standard way to make a noun plural is to add -s to the end.

But more often than not, when a noun ends in a single consonant, the plural is instead formed by adding -es.

That happens for nouns that end in exactly one of the letters D, J, L, N, R, S, X, or Y. Words ending in multiple consonants or a different consonant still usually take -s to form the plural, but since most words that end in consonants take -s, there’s no need to memorize that list of letters.

Notice how the word estación in the example above lost its acute accent when it became plural. To understand why that happened, remember from Lesson 1.1 that the acute accent places emphasis on a particular syllable and that, if there is no accent, the second-to-last syllable is emphasized. That means that when you add -es, the accent might cease to be necessary because it’s now on the second-to-last syllable, so you can remove it.

The opposite can also happen: if adding -es causes the emphasized syllable to no longer be in the second-to-last position, you should add an accent to keep it emphasized.

Finally, there are three special endings for plurals that show up every now and then:

1. For nouns ending in -s or -x (where the last syllable is not emphasized), the plural is the same as the singular. Example: lunes (Monday) remains lunes
2. For nouns ending in -í or -ú with accents, you can generally add either -s or -es, with the -es form being considered a bit more formal. Example: maní (peanut) becomes manís or maníes
3. For nouns ending in -z, change the -z to -ces. Example: pez (fish) becomes peces

Adjective agreement

You might remember from lesson 1.2 that adjectives can change their form depending on the gender of the noun they modify. That’s called adjective agreement, and it happens based on two factors: gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural).

Adjectives are conventionally given in their masculine singular form by default. To find the feminine singular form, make the following changes:

• Adjectives ending in -o: change the -o to -a
• Adjectives ending in -or or an emphasized -n: add -a
• Adjectives for nationality ending in a consonant: add -a
• All other adjectives: no change

Agreement for number is even simpler: find the correct form for gender, then add -s if it ends in a vowel and -es if it ends in a consonant.

Like plural nouns, adjectives that end in -z replace -z with -ces in the plural.

In some of the above examples, you may have noticed that an acute accent was removed when the adjective took a new form. When applying agreement, adjectives may gain or lose accents in the exact same way as nouns: depending on whether the accents are needed or not to keep the emphasis on the same syllable.

Finally, it’s worth noting that a few adjectives are invariable, which means that they never change form for gender or number. They’re not that common, but the typical pattern is that adjectives that can also serve as nouns are invariable.