German words ending in -ur

A noun ending in -ur is die, with a short list of exceptions worth knowing by name.

die Oma the character this deck pins every die-word on

-ur arrives in German on borrowed words, most of them from Latin through French: die Natur, die Kultur, die Literatur, die Temperatur. The ending came over feminine and stayed feminine. That is why it behaves like a rule rather than a coincidence.

Two things break the pattern, and they break it in different ways. A few native or reborrowed nouns simply are not feminine, and those you learn one at a time. Separately, a whole family of masculine agent nouns ends in -eur, not -ur: der Friseur, der Ingenieur, der Coiffeur. Those are a different suffix that happens to share the letters, and treating them as -ur exceptions is how a rule page starts teaching something false.

So the working version carries two conditions. -ur is die unless the word ends in -eur, and unless it is one of the few the list below names.

Worked examples

die Natur nature
die Kultur culture
die Reparatur repair
die Temperatur temperature
die Frisur hairstyle

Measured on this deck

83% of the 12 nouns ending in -ur are die

The deck puts a number on how safe that is. 10 nouns ending in -ur are die and 2 are not. That is 83 percent, good enough to guess with and not good enough to stop reading.

die Reparatur die Reparaturen
die Kultur die Kulturen
die Natur die Naturen
die Tour die Touren
die Figur die Figuren
die Frisur die Frisuren
die Literatur die Literaturen
die Spur die Spuren
die Tastatur die Tastaturen
die Temperatur die Temperaturen

The ones that break it

2 nouns in this deck end in -ur and are not die. They are short and they are common, so learn them as words rather than as counter-examples.

das Abitur die Abiture
der Flur die Flure

Looks like it, is not

These end in the same three letters and are not this suffix. They are -eur, the masculine agent ending, so none of them is an exception to the -ur rule.

der Coiffeur die Coiffeure
der Friseur die Friseure
der Ingenieur die Ingenieure

What a card looks like

Natur

Try it

-ur words are thin on the ground in a beginner deck, so the drill below is the mixed one. Expect this rule to settle a card or two and stay out of the rest.

Wohnung