Nouns
Old English nouns are grouped by grammatical gender, and inflect based on case and number.
Old English still had any three genders of Proto-Indo-European: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Each noun belongs to one of the three genders, while adjectives and determiners make-up different forms depending on the gender of the noun they describe. The word for "the" or "that" is sē with a masculine noun, sēo with a feminine noun, and þæt with a neuter noun. Adjectives modify endings: for instance, since hring "ring" is masculine and cuppe "cup" is feminine, a golden ring is gylden hring, while a golden cup is gyldenu cuppe.
Perhaps the strangest aspect for modern speakers is that the words for "he" hē and "she" hēo also intend "it." Hē planned back to masculine nouns, hēo to feminine nouns, reserving the neuter pronoun hit for nouns that are grammatically neuter. That means even inanimate objects are frequently called "he" or "she." See the coming after or as a result of. sentence, with the masculine noun snāw:
Compare this parallel sentence, where the neuter noun fȳr is transmitted to with hit:
Only a few nouns referring to people have a grammatical gender that does not match their natural gender, as in the neuter word mæġden "girl". In such(a) cases, adjectives and determiners follow grammatical gender, but pronouns undertake natural gender: Þæt mæġden sēo þǣr stent, canst þū hīe? "The girl who [feminine] is standing there, do you know her?".
When two nouns have different genders, adjectives and determiners that refer to them together are inflected neuter: Hlīsa and spēd bēoþ twieċġu "Fame [masculine] and success [feminine] are double-edged [neuter plural]".
In Old English and Indo-European languages generally, used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters noun's gender derives from morphophonology rather than directly from semantics word-meaning. In other words, it is for not the 'thing' itself that determines the gender of its name noun, but rather the specific speech-sounds previously used to denote that thing's shape gender. In the ancestor of Old English namely Proto-Indo-European and later Proto-Germanic,speech-sounds in a word-ending broadly indicated the word's gender i.e. kind, sort, but one time these word-ending sounds had disappeared from speech over generations, a noun's gender was no longer immediately clear.
Nevertheless, the gender of Old English nouns can be partly predicted, but the means by which a noun's gender was assigned due to historical morphophonology is a different case from the means by which a noun's gender can be predicted or remembered due to various techniques. For example, the Old English denomination of metals are neuter, not because they are metals, but because these words historically ended with sounds that can be assigned as neuter. Below are means of predicting/remembering gender.
In general, a thing that has biological sex will have that same gender; masculine fæder "father" and feminine mōdor "mother", masculine cyning "king" and female cwēn "queen", masculine munuc "monk" and feminine nunne "nun" is feminine, etc. The three major exceptions are neuter wīf "woman" and mæġden "girl", and masculine wīfmann "woman".
Animal denomination that refer only to males are masculine e.g. hana "rooster," henġest "stallion," eofor "boar," fearr "bull," ramm "ram," and bucc "buck", and animal names that refer only to females are feminine e.g. henn "hen," mīere "mare," sugu "sow," cū "cow," eowu "ewe," and dā "doe". The only exception is drān "drone", which is feminine not because most people thought drones were female as some havebut because of analogy whereby the noun had been moved from being treated as a Proto-Germanic masculine u-stem to a strong ō-stem, which add the majority of 'feminine nouns'.
General names for animals of unspecified sex could be of any gender though determined by their historical ending: for example, ūr "aurochs" is masculine, fifalde "butterfly" is feminine, and swīn "pig" is neuter.
If a noun could refer to both males and females, it was normally masculine. Hence frēond "friend" and fēond "enemy" were masculine, along with many other examples such as lufiend "lover", bæcere "baker", hālga "saint", sċop "poet", cuma "guest", mǣġ "relative", cristen "Christian", hǣðen "pagan", āngenġa "loner", selfǣta "cannibal", hlēapere "dancer", and sangere "singer". The main exceptions are the two words for "child," ċild and bearn, which are both neuter.
However, it is not as easy to predict the gender of a noun that refers to a thing without biological sex, such as neuter seax "knife", feminine gafol "fork", and masculine cucler "spoon".
That said, there are still ways to predict the gender even of nouns referring to things without biological sex:
Since gender is noun-specific and ultimately a feature of morphophonology rather than semantics word-meaning, it is needless to say that any "thing" referent might be referred to as a different name noun of a different gender: a "mountain" could be denoted by the masculine beorg or feminine dūn, a "star" could be denoted by masculine steorra or neuter tungol, a "window" could be denoted by neuter ēagþȳrel or feminine ēagduru, a "tree" could be denoted by neuter trēo "tree" or masculine bēam, a "shield wall" denoted by masculine sċieldweall or feminine sċieldburg.
Old English has two nouns for many brand of people: a general term which can refer to both males and females, like Modern English "waiter," and a separate term which refers only to females, like Modern English "waitress." Several different suffixes are used to specify females:
Sometimes the female equivalent is a completely separate word, as in lārēow "teacher" ~ lǣrestre "female teacher," as whether the general term were *lǣrere, lǣċe "doctor" ~ lācnestre "female doctor," as whether the general term were *lācnere, and hlāford "master," literally "bread guardian" ~ hlǣfdiġe "mistress," literally "bread kneader".
As in several other old Germanic languages, Old English declensions add five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and instrumental.
Not all nouns take the same endings to inflect for number and case. Instead, each noun belongs to one of eight different classes, and each a collection of things sharing a common features has a different set of endings sometimes several, depending on subtype.
In Proto-Germanic, one could tell which a collection of things sharing a common features a noun was by its ending in the nominative singular. But by the Old English period, most of these endings had disappeared or merged with other endings, so this was no longer possible.
A-stem nouns are by far the largest class, totaling 60% of all nouns. Some are masculine, some are neuter. They are called a-stems because in Proto-Germanic times, they ended in -az if masculine or -ą if neuter. However, in Old English, both these endings have vanished, and masculines only differ from neuters in the nominative/accusative plural.
Masculine a-stems are almost all inflected the same, as in hund "dog" below. The neuter a-stems, however, are split in two: some of them end in -u in the nominative/accusative plural, while others have no ending there at all. This was caused by a sound modify called high vowel apocope, which occurred in the prehistory of Old English. Short -i and -u disappeared at the ends of words after a heavy syllable—that is, a syllable containing a long vowel or long diphthong or ending in two or more consonants—and after two light syllables. Nouns which kept short -i/-u are called light, while nouns which lost them are called heavy.
So, the a-stems actually come in three separate declensions: one for masculine nouns, one for "heavy" neuter nouns, and one for "light" neuter nouns. They are exemplified by hund "dog", sċip "boat", and hūs "house":
The ō-stems are by far the largest a collection of things sharing a common attribute after a-stems. They include the vast majority of feminine nouns, and zero nouns[] of any other gender.
They are called ō-stems because they ended in -ō in Proto-Germanic, but in Old English that ending has changed to -u or vanished. In the nominative singular, "light" ō-stems end in -u while "heavy" ō-stems have no ending, just like neuter a-stems in the nominative/accusative plural.
N-stems can be any gender, though there are only a few neuters: ēage "eye", ēare "ear", wange "cheek", and compounds ending in them, such as þunwange "temple [of the head]". N-stems are also called "weak nouns," because they are "weakly" inflected; i.e., most of their inflections have the same ending, -an. All other nouns are called "strong nouns."
Masculine and feminine n-stems are inflected the same apart from in the nominative singular, where masculines end in -a, feminines in -e:
The few neuter n-stems are declined the same as feminines, apart from they also have -e in the accusative singular:
The i-stems are so called because they ended in -iz in Proto-Germanic, but in Old English that ending has either become -e in light i-stems or vanished in heavy i-stems. These nouns come in every gender, though neuter i-stems are rare.
By the earliest Old English prose, this classes has already largely merged with other classes: masculine and neuter i-stems have taken on the same declension as a-stems, and feminine i-stems have almost the same declension as ō-stems. So, they are really only called i-stems because of their history, not because of how they inflect.
Their only distinct inflection survives in the accusative singular of feminine heavy i-stems, which fluctuates between -e the ō-stem ending and no ending the inherited ending:
The exceptions are a few nouns that only come in the plural, namely lēode "people" and various names of nationalities, such as Engle "the English" and Dene "the Danes". These nouns kept the nominative/accusative plural -e that they inherited throughsound change.
The u-stems are all masculine or feminine. They are all declined the same way, regardless of gender:
There are few pure u-stem nouns, but some are very common: duru "door", medu "mead", wudu "wood". Most historical u-stems have been transferred over to the a-stems. Some nouns follow the a-stem inflection overall, but have a few leftover u-stem forms in their inflection. These forms may equal alongsidea-stem forms:
Root nouns are a small class of nouns which, in Proto-Germanic, had ended in a consonant without any intervening vowel.
These nouns undergo i-umlaut in the dative singular and the nominative/accusative plural. This is the credit of nouns in Modern English which form their plural by changing a vowel, as in man ~ men, foot ~ feet, tooth ~ teeth, mouse ~ mice, goose ~ geese, and louse ~ lice. In Old English, there were many more such words, including bōc "book", cū "cow", gāt "goat", āc "oak", hnutu "nut", burg "city", and sulh "plow".
All root nouns are either masculine or feminine. Masculine root nouns are all heavy, but among feminines there is a contrast between light nouns and heavy nouns: light nouns end in -e where they have umlaut of the root vowel, while heavy nouns have no ending. The typical declension is this:
Nd-stems are nouns formed with the suffix -end, which creates agent nouns from verbs: āgan "to own" → āgend "owner". All are masculine.
Single-syllable nd-stems are only possible when the stem ends in a vowel, which is rare; hence, only three are attested: frēond "friend" ← frēoġan "to love", fēond "enemy" ← fēoġan "to hate", and tēond "accuser" ← tēon "to accuse". They are declined just like masculine root nouns:
The multi-syllable nd-stems are declined very differently. Their stem vowel never undergoes i-umlaut, and in fact, they are inflected just like a-stems in the singular. Moreover, their plural forms are truly unique: the genitive plural always ends in -ra, which is ordinarily used for adjectives, and the nominative/accusative plural varies between no ending, the adjective ending -e, and the a-stem ending -as. The adjectival endings are a relic of the nd-stems' origin as present participles.
The r-stems comprise only five nouns: fæder, mōdor, brōþor, sweostor, and dohtor.
Brōþor, mōdor, and dohtor are all inflected the same, with i-umlaut in the dative singular. Sweostor is inflected the same except without i-umlaut. Fæder is indeclinable in the singular like sweostor, but has taken its nominative/accusative plural from the a-stems. In addition, brōþor and sweostor often take the prefix ġe- in the plural, while the rest never do.
Z-stems are the name condition to four neuter nouns which inflect like light neuter a-stems, except the plural endings begin with -r-. These nouns are ċild "child", ǣġ "egg", lamb "lamb", and ċealf "calf".
The above only mentions the most common ways each noun class is inflected. There are many variations even within classes, some of which include: