The gender of sugar (azúcar)

I drank a lot of coffee when I was recently in Spain, partly because of jet lag and partly because the coffee was so good. As in the U.S., it was always served with a small paper container of sugar. Who ever reads these containers? I do — when I’m in Spain — and was rewarded with a linguistic gem: one sugar packet I opened was labeled azucar morena (see picture). This was truly surprising, not because of the missing accent mark on azúcar, but because morena is a feminine adjective, and azúcar is masculine.

Or is it?

Although I had learned azúcar as a masculine noun, and had always seen it treated as such, It turns out that azúcar is one of a handful of Spanish nouns that are ambiguous in gender, meaning that either morena or moreno is legitimate. You can see this for yourself on wordreference.com or in the Real Academia Española dictionary.

I was familiar with this phenomenon from the examples of radioesperma ‘sperm’, and reúma  ‘rheumatism’. The latter two were borrowed from Greek as feminines because of their final -a, but have drifted toward masculine usage because the -ma masculine, most often seen in words of Greek origin, is associated with intellectual words such as temapoema, and apotegma.

In its Nueva gramática de la lengua española, the Real Academia points out that words of ambiguous gender are relatively rare. Besides azúcar, they list:

  • mar ‘sea’ (I believe that the feminine usage is confined to set expressions like pelillos a la mar ‘let bygones be bygones’)
  • agravante ‘aggravating circumstance’
  • armazón ‘shell, frame’ (as of a building)
  • azumbre ‘liquid measure, corresponding to 2 liters’
  • interrogante ‘question’
  • maratón ‘marathon’
  • prez ‘honor’
  • pringue ‘grease, drippings’
  • ánade ‘duck’

Now that I’ve written this post, I can finally throw out the sugar packets I brought home from Spain: a sweet reminder (jajaja) of how travel can open up new linguistic horizons.

4 thoughts on “The gender of sugar (azúcar)

  1. Davicero

    The use of “mar” as feminine is not confined to common idioms. The feminine form is usual in southern Spain and also in poetic usage. A great example of the latter is Rafael Alberti’s poetry. By the way, a poet from Cádiz.

    El mar. La mar.
    El mar. ¡Sólo la mar!
    ¿Por qué me trajiste, padre,
    a la ciudad?
    ¿Por qué me desenterraste
    del mar?
    En sueños la marejada
    me tira del corazón;
    se lo quisiera llevar.
    Padre, ¿por qué me trajiste
    acá?
    Gimiendo por ver el mar,
    un marinerito en tierra
    iza al aire este lamento:
    ¡Ay mi blusa marinera;
    siempre me la inflaba el viento
    al divisar la escollera!

    Reply
  2. jhochberg Post author

    Thank you for your comment. The RAE discusses regional variation for ‘mar’, and also for ‘calor’, which they say is feminine in Andalusia and parts of Latin America. What’s interesting about ‘radio’, ‘azúcar’, and the others listed in my post (besides ‘mar’, is that their gender fluctuation is neither stylistic (idioms and poetry) nor regional.

    Reply
  3. Glen MacDonald

    OMG, here I am, sitting in La Crucecita (Mexico), in a restaurant, trying to tell my wife how wrong the sugar package is because they wrote “azúcar refinada” (not “azúcar refinado”). I then stumbled upon your post and thought, “No solo el único detallista del mundo!” jajaja

    Thanks for taking the time to inform me (and the rest of the Internet) of these rare exceptions!

    Reply

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