Which Dutch nouns take de

de is the everyday Dutch article: about two out of three singular nouns take it, and every plural takes it. de man (the man), de tafel (the table), de kinderen (the children). When you have no other clue, de is the guess that is right most often.

Several groups of nouns take de reliably. Learn these and you can predict the article for a large share of the words you meet.

• People and professions: de vrouw (the woman), de dokter (the doctor), de leraar (the teacher). Words for people carry a real male or female gender, and that natural gender pulls them to de; the one everyday word that breaks the pattern is het kind (the child).
• Fruits, trees and plants: de appel (the apple), de boom (the tree), de bloem (the flower). Note het fruit itself is a het-word, but the individual fruits are de-words.
• Every plural noun, whatever its singular article: het glas → de glazen (the glasses). See the plural in -en.

A number of word endings mark a de-word. When a new noun ends in one of these, take de.

-er points to de when it turns a verb into the person who performs the action: schilderen (to paint) gives de schilder (the painter), kappen (to cut hair) gives de kapper (the hairdresser). The endings -aar and -eur do the same job — they name a doer built from a verb — and they also take de.

The ending -schap does not settle the article on its own — it splits between the two. Some -schap nouns are de-words: de vriendschap (the friendship), de wetenschap (science), de boodschap (the message, the errand). Many others are het-words: het gereedschap (the tools), het lidmaatschap (the membership), het landschap (the landscape), het gezelschap (the company). Because the ending points both ways, learn the article together with each -schap noun rather than trusting the ending.

Because de is the default, the real risk is not the de-words themselves but forgetting the smaller het-set that overrides these groups. A diminutive is always het, even when it names a person: het meisje (the girl) and het jongetje (the little boy) take het, not de, although people are otherwise de-words. When two rules collide, the het-groups win — see which nouns take het.