shouldn't lápiz be feminine since it ends in z?
Shouldn't lápiz be feminine since it ends in z?
5 Answers
Remember that all of those "rules" or groupings of words that have similar gender assignments are just guidelines. There are exceptions to all of them. The only way to know the gender of a word is to look it up in the dictionary (where you must also know context).
Por ejemplo:
If I ask you what the gender is for the noun cometa, when you look it up you find that it can be masculine or feminine depending on whether it means comet or kite.
If I ask you what the gender is for the noun artista, when you look it up you will find that it is invariable and can refer to an artist of either sex depending on which definite article precedes it.
My adivice for knowing whether lápiz is masculine is feminine is to look in the dictionary. Even so you will still have problems with things like "el agua". Gender is not a straightforward attribute.
I have a list of 157 masculine words ending in z. Shall we call the police about this massive infraction of the rules? 
I don't know ... hmmmm "la lápiz" would sound terrible. 
Sometimes, rules are broken for a reason. 
Shouldn't lápiz be feminine since it ends in z?
You are operating under the mistaken assumption that there is some sort of logic to the gender of nouns. There isn't. There is only historical precedent. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and, I suppose Romanian speakers do not understand why a noun is masculine/feminine, they simply remember which it is. One could point out that the gender is often whatever it was in Latin/Greek but that only pushes the question back to "why was it that gender in those languages?" (to which there is no known answer).
Whats the rule behind the words ending with 'z'?
