English has one plural ending and a handful of survivors like children. German has five, and no ending at all for one group. That sounds worse than it is: the ending is largely predictable from the gender and the shape of the word.
The five are -e, -er, -(e)n, -s, and nothing. Some of them add an umlaut on the way.
Feminine nouns take -(e)n
This is the most useful plural rule in the language. Feminine nouns are roughly a third of the vocabulary and this covers about 90% of them.
| Singular | Plural |
|---|---|
| die Frau | die Frauen |
| die Blume | die Blumen |
| die Zeitung | die Zeitungen |
| die Wohnung | die Wohnungen |
Words already ending in -e just add -n. Everything else adds -en. No umlaut, ever.
Masculine nouns usually take -e
Whether the vowel umlauts is unpredictable enough to learn with the word. Hund does not take one. Mann takes both an umlaut and -er.
Neuter nouns take -e or -er, and -er always umlauts
| Singular | Plural |
|---|---|
| das Jahr | die Jahre |
| das Buch | die Bücher |
| das Haus | die Häuser |
| das Kind | die Kinder |
| das Bild | die Bilder |
| das Land | die Länder |
If a neuter noun takes -er, it umlauts whenever the vowel can: a, o, u, au become ä, ö, ü, äu. Kind has an i, which cannot umlaut, so it just adds -er.
Some nouns do not change at all
Masculine and neuter nouns ending in -en, -er or -el usually keep the same form. Sometimes they take an umlaut and nothing else.
| Singular | Plural |
|---|---|
| der Lehrer | die Lehrer |
| der Kuchen | die Kuchen |
| der Apfel | die Äpfel |
This is why the article carries so much weight in German. der Lehrer and die Lehrer are spelled identically, and only the article says whether there is one teacher or several.
-s is the borrowed ending
-s is the plural for words German took from English and French, and for abbreviations.
| Singular | Plural |
|---|---|
| das Auto | die Autos |
| das Hotel | die Hotels |
| der Chef | die Chefs |
If a word looks foreign, -s is the safe guess.
The one rule that is always true
**Every plural takes die,** whatever the singular gender was. der Hund becomes die Hunde. das Buch becomes die Bücher.
So the plural of a masculine noun looks exactly like a feminine singular, and only context separates them. It also means there is only ever one plural article to learn, which is the good news in this whole area.
What to actually memorise
Not the tables. Learn the plural with the word, the way this deck stores it — every noun page shows its plural beside the article. Then let these three do the guessing when you have not:
- Feminine, so -(e)n, no umlaut.
- Neuter with -er, so an umlaut as well.
- Ends in -en, -er or -el, so probably no change at all.
Rules stick faster once you have met the words. Every example above links to its own page.
Practise in the trainer