This is lesson 4 in Crashed Culture’s Spanish grammar series.

Singular to plural Spanish

Up to now, we’ve been through some lessons that can take a bit of learning; fortunately, the rules for singular to plural Spanish are almost just like the rules in English. Yeah, there are a couple of quirks to understanding singular to plural Spanish, but you should be able to get this no problem.

Going forward with this lesson, remember your articles! All of our articles, whether definite or indefinite, always need to match our nouns. So, keeping that in mind, let’s get to the rules for switching from singular to plural Spanish.

Singular to plural Spanish: the rules

The rules for going from singular to plural Spanish change depending on the anatomy of the word itself. The letter the noun ends with, the article before it, whether or not there’s an accent…there’s more than one rule.

And guess what? They’re all down below. Take a look at these examples and you’ll be confident in making your nouns go plural in no time!

Definite articles + nouns ending in vowels

Okay, let’s start with regular, run-of-the-mill nouns with definite articles. As you can tell in the examples below, this is what we do:

• Feminine nouns: add an s after both the article and the noun
• Masculine nouns: change the ‘el’ to los and add an s after the noun

Indefinite articles + nouns ending in vowels

Next is the same story, but with indefinite articles. For the sake of making this easy, I’ll use the same nouns as before. That being said, the rules are pretty similar:

• Feminine nouns: add an s after both the article and the noun
• Masculine nouns: add an os after the ‘un’ an add an s after the noun

So, just like the first rule, it’s pretty simple - just a little bit of changing up the articles in the case of masculine nouns.

Also, from here on out, the rules for the articles don’t change! No matter what else is going on, you now know how to switch from singular to plural articles. The rest of these rules are only different when it comes to the nouns themselves. And don’t worry - it’s easy!

Nouns ending in consonants

Just like in English, Spanish nouns that end in consonants just get an es thrown on after them. Real easy for our English brains to comprehend, and the rules don’t change depending on the genders of our nouns.

Nouns with accents

Next up, we have accents. This is obviously different from English ’cause guess how many accented words we have? Zero! What we do with these accents depends on where they are in the word:

As we can see from these examples, accents in the word’s first syllable stay, while accents in the second syllable go. And, just like the way the spelling of the word changes, so does how it’s pronounced. And, really, it just makes it easier to pronounce across the board.

Nouns ending in z

If you’ve noticed, each rule has been building up on the rule before it. Let’s continue to do so, shall we? If we’re trying to pluralize a noun that ends in ‘z’, we:

• change the ‘z’ to ‘c’
• add an ‘es’

For example:

A reminder about gender

And, finally, one quick reminder about how the Spanish language treats gender. You can have a group of a thousand females (people, cats, etc.), but as soon as you put a single male into the bunch, the whole group is referred to as male.

Singular to plural Spanish

And there you have it! While there might be an exception here and there (we all know there’s always exceptions), you now have all the rules for switching from singular to plural Spanish in your arsenal. To recap, they are:

• Nouns ending in vowels: add an s
• Nouns ending in consonants: add an es
• Nouns with accents in the first syllable: keep the accent
• Nouns with accents in the last syllable: drop the accent
• Nouns ending in z: change the z to a c and add an es

Ready to move on?

Check out the next lesson: subject pronouns