I am in Spain on business and launched Google to quickly look up some conference details. Staring back at me was ‘La Web‘. So there you have it, folks. That willey, brilliant collaboration we call the web is in fact a woman. Considering the fact that anything so complicated could function that well, the choice is no surprise. Which makes me wonder, when a new word appears in a language that assigns gender to everything, how does it get selected and who makes the final call?

When trying to figure this out, Wikipedia was my savior.

Internet causes speakers to hesitate between making it masculine like other loanwords from English, or making it feminine to agree with “red”, the Spanish word for “net”.

So it looks like Google just took a stand. How does Spanish deal with gender when incorporating foreign words? According to Wikipedia:

• Take the gender they have in that language, with neuter taken to be the same as masculine (so English nouns are made masculine)
• Take the gender it seems to be (e.g. la Coca-Cola because it ends in -a)
• Take the gender of the closest-related Spanish word (e.g. la Guinness because of la cerveza)