Sunday, 15 November 2026

The grammatical gender of the Russian word biennale in dictionaries and in practice

The grammatical gender of the Russian word biennale in dictionaries and in practice

In the Russian Academy of Sciences' Russian Orthographic Dictionary, biennale and b'ennale are recorded as nouns of masculine or feminine gender. The dictionary of foreign words, by contrast, makes biennale neuter. In practice, meanwhile, we see that biennale is most often used as a feminine word. Though that same Lopatin dictionary recommends writing biennale in the masculine when the word means "festival", and in the feminine when an exhibition is meant.

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