♀️ “Testosterone” is feminine
In French and Spanish, “testosterone” is feminine (testostérone, testosterona), but in Italian and Romanian, it’s masculine, as expected (testosterone, testosteron).
The same stands for “hormone”—you can guess its gender across these languages.
What the fucking fuck? Feminine?
Claude Sonnet 5 Medium:
Ha — yeah, it looks backwards at first, but there’s a tidy reason.
The culprit is French chemical nomenclature. Way back when French chemists were naming compounds, they settled into a convention where certain suffixes got assigned feminine gender regardless of the root’s meaning: -ine (cocaïne, morphine, adrénaline), -ase (enzymes), -ose (sugars: glucose, fructose), and -one (acétone, cétone... and testostérone). It’s a bit arbitrary — contrast this with -ane (méthane, éthane) and -ol (alcool, phénol), which are masculine. French just decided “-one” chemical names would be she/her.
Since testosterone, progesterone, and hormone itself were coined/popularized in this French scientific tradition, they entered the language as feminine nouns.
Spanish then borrowed the word wholesale and it slotted in easily, because Spanish nouns ending in -a are overwhelmingly feminine anyway (testosterona, progesterona, hormona, acetona) — so the French gender and Spanish’s own morphological instinct reinforced each other.
Italian and Romanian, though, didn’t inherit the gender assignment — they inherited the word and then applied their own grammar to it. In Italian, -one is a classic masculine ending (il pallone, il bastone, il limone — even as an augmentative suffix, -one is masculine-marking). So “testosterone” and “ormone” got slotted into the masculine class by pure morphological pattern-matching, French logic be damned. Romanian, also Romance but with its own declension habits, did the same thing.
So it’s not that anyone thought about hormones and decided they’re “girly” — it’s a suffix that was gendered arbitrarily in one language for chemistry-naming reasons, and then either kept or overridden depending on how strongly each language’s own ending-pattern rules pushed back.
Follow-up: OK, but “libido” is feminine, whereas “placebo” is masculine in French.
Claude: That one’s a different mechanism entirely — it’s about what these words actually were in Latin before French got hold of them.
Libido is a genuine Latin noun, third declension: libido, libidinis. And Latin has a small but real class of abstract nouns ending in -do that are feminine — cupido (desire), dulcedo (sweetness), multitudo (multitude), consuetudo (custom). This isn't random; it’s a productive suffix pattern in Latin itself, feminine by rule. French borrowed libido directly as a learned/clinical term (via Freud, essentially) and just kept its native Latin gender intact, the way French does with a lot of scholarly Latin borrowings.
Placebo, meanwhile, was never a noun in Latin at all — it’s a verb form. Placebo literally means “I shall please” (future indicative of placere). It got nouned through a very specific historical detour: the Catholic Vespers for the dead opens with “Placebo Domino” (“I shall please the Lord”), medieval mourners who showed up just for the free food were mockingly said to “sing placebo,” and from there it became a noun for a flatterer/sycophant in French and English — centuries before medicine repurposed it for sham treatments.
Since it entered noun-land with zero inherited Latin gender to carry over, French did what it does with most borrowed/foreign-feeling words ending in -o: defaulted to masculine. Same reason you get le piano, le tempo, le silo, le scénario — that’s just the fallback bucket for -o words without a native gender pedigree.
So: libido is feminine because it’s smuggling in real Latin grammar; placebo is masculine because it’s grammatically a fugitive — a verb cosplaying as a noun with no gender papers, so it gets sorted into the default pile.