“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.