German words ending in -en

-en is the ending you will see called masculine most often, and on the words a B1 syllabus asks for it is not. The masculine ones and the rest sit near enough level that the ending carries no information, and a guess on it is close to a coin.

What makes this page useful is that the misses have a shape. One family is the nominalised infinitive: take any verb, write it with a capital letter, and you get a neuter noun. Essen, Leben, Wissen, Schreiben, Vergnügen. If the word is a verb wearing a capital, it is das, every time.

The other family is plural. Die Ferien and die Kosten are the pure case, words that have no singular in normal use at all. The rest are ordinary plurals of ordinary nouns, and they teach the point better: the die in front of a plural is a plural article and says nothing about the gender underneath it. Die Unterlagen sits on the feminine Unterlage, die Zinsen on the masculine Zins, die Daten on the neuter Datum that this site files under the Latin -um. Three genders behind one article, because a plural does not mark gender.

Strip those two families out and what is left, the plain masculine nouns like der Garten, der Kuchen and der Wagen, still has to be learned word by word. The ending is not a rule. It is a place where two other bits of grammar happen to leave the same letters behind.