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. -ion, -ität and the bare -tät came over from Latin the same way and are die as well.
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