German words ending in -enz
A noun ending in -enz is die, as long as -enz is an ending and not the whole word.
-enz comes from the Latin ending -entia, and English took the same ending as -ence. That gives you a reliable bridge: Konferenz is conference, Intelligenz is intelligence, Tendenz is tendency, Existenz is existence. The words arrived in German already feminine and stayed that way.
The suffix itself has no exceptions at all. What it has instead is the look-alike problem -anz has, one vowel over. In a word of a single syllable the letters are a native stem rather than an ending, so der Lenz, the old poetic word for spring, is masculine. Leave that kind aside and every German noun ending in -enz takes die.
Its sibling is -anz, from Latin -antia, which behaves identically. Learn them as one pair and you have covered both.
Worked examples
- die Intelligenz intelligence
- die Konferenz conference
- die Konkurrenz competition
Measured on this deck
100% of the 3 nouns ending in -enz are die
3 nouns in this deck end in -enz and every one is die, so the ending sits at 100 percent here. The rule does not lean on that count either way: Latin loanwords in -entia came into German feminine long before this deck existed, and the deck simply agrees with what the language already settled.
- die Intelligenz die Intelligenzen
- die Konferenz die Konferenzen
- die Konkurrenz die Konkurrenzen
What a card looks like
Intelligenz
Try it
The drill below leans on the words a beginner meets first, so -enz is not what it will ask you.
Wohnung