🗣️ 11. Nouns

The Ukrainian noun has a fixed gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), inflects for number (singular, plural) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and the vocative), and is either animate or inanimate, which decides the form of its accusative. Nouns fall into four declensions by gender and ending, and the first two into hard, soft and mixed groups. This chapter gives gender (§1), animacy (§2), number (§3), the cases and their frequencies (§4), the vocative (§5), the declensions with full paradigms (§6), the vowel alternations that run through them (§7), the masculine genitive in -а or -у (§8), the other masculine endings with variants (§9), the changes of the 2019 orthography and how usage stands to them (§10), indeclinable nouns (§11), plural-only nouns (§12), and how Mova treats nouns (§13).

The norm cited is the 2019 Український правопис (Ukrajins'kyj pravopys, below "Pravopys 2019"), whose morphology part (§§66–100 for nouns) is the current codification; it lists many endings as variants, and this chapter keeps them as variants. Counts were made on 2026-11-06 over UD Ukrainian 2.18 (IU: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only, no sentence quoted; ParlaMint: CC BY-SA 4.0, Verkhovna Rada speeches of 2003, 2004 and 2014), the VESUM lemma list (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only) and the Leipzig ukr_news_2024 sample of one million news sentences (CC BY). Examples are constructed unless marked; stress is marked with an acute where it matters.

1. Gender

1.1 Three genders and how to tell them

Every singular noun is masculine, feminine or neuter. The ending of the nominative singular predicts the gender for most nouns:

Three groups are worth naming:

• Nouns of common gender (спільний рід, spil'nyj rid) in -а/-я name persons by a trait and take masculine or feminine agreement according to the person: сирота 'orphan', нероба 'idler', плакса 'cry-baby', невдаха 'loser', листоноша 'postman, postwoman', суддя 'judge', убивця 'killer' (Pravopys 2019 §§66–67): цей сирота (a boy), ця сирота (a girl).
• Augmentatives in -ище/-исько keep the gender of their base or become neuter: вітрище 'huge wind' and вовчисько 'huge wolf' are masculine, ножище 'huge leg' (from нога) neuter, ведмедище both (Pravopys 2019 §66).
• Masculine nouns of feminine form, the type Микола, decline as first-declension nouns (Миколи, Миколі) but agree as masculine: наш Микола прийшов.

Gender is grammatical and does not follow sex for most things: дитина 'child' and людина 'person' are feminine, дівча 'girl', хлоп'я 'lad' neuter. Gender also differs from the neighbouring languages in many common words, a known source of interference in mixed speech: біль 'pain' and насип 'embankment' are masculine in Ukrainian; степ 'steppe' is masculine (широкий степ); собака 'dog' is masculine in the standard (злий собака); Сибір is masculine. All five are feminine in Russian, and the Russian gender turns up in surzhyk and in careless writing (*сильна біль). For such words dictionaries give the gender, and corpora show the competing uses.

1.2 How the genders divide

In the dictionary masculine and feminine lemmas are nearly equal and neuters are a third of either. In running text, masculines lead in IU (fiction and news are full of рік 'year', час 'time', народ 'people'); the parliament uses many abstract feminines in -ість and -ція and many verbal neuters in -ння (питання 'question', рішення 'decision', голосування 'vote'), which raises those two genders. ParlaMint marks 573 tokens as Gender=Fem,Masc: nouns of common gender and surnames like Шевченко whose bearer's sex is not known from the context.

Indeclinable loans get their gender by meaning and form (Pravopys 2019 §140 lists them): things in -о, -е, -і, -у are neuter (кафе, метро, таксі, меню, шосе), with exceptions that follow a generic word (кольрабі f after капуста 'cabbage', авеню f after вулиця 'street', салямі f after ковбаса 'sausage'); the loans in -о are neuter except the masculine євро (Shvedova 2020); persons take the gender of their sex (аташе m, леді f, мадам f); animals are masculine (кенгуру, поні, шимпанзе) unless a female is meant; place names take the gender of the generic word (Тбілісі m after місто 'city', Міссісіпі f after ріка 'river'). The gender of these words is settled by dictionaries, and corpora show variation for the newest ones.

Feminine names of professions (лікарка 'female doctor', директорка, авторка), endorsed by the 2019 orthography (§32), are derivation and are treated in 17. Derivation: suffixes.

2. Animacy

Animacy is a grammatical category: nouns naming people and animals are animate (істоти, istoty), others inanimate (неістоти). It shows in one place only, the accusative:

In the singular, only masculines of the second declension distinguish animacy. In the plural, all nouns do: бачу корів 'I see the cows', бачу дівчат 'I see the girls'. The UD treebanks carry the feature Animacy on nouns: IU 6 249 animate and 26 643 inanimate noun tokens, ParlaMint 5 232 and 25 589. VESUM has 68 340 animate noun lemma lines and a third value, unanim (94 lines), for words that take both accusatives: microorganisms such as агробактерія, авксотроф (бачити мікроби and мікробів).

Three groups depart from the simple rule:

1. Inanimate masculines with the genitive-like accusative. Concrete nouns, mostly everyday objects, trees, documents, vehicles and coins, may take -а/-я in the accusative singular: зрізав дуб and дуба 'cut down the oak', написав лист and листа 'wrote a letter', узяв ніж and ножа 'took the knife', вивчив вірш and вірша 'learnt a poem', уклав акт and акта 'drew up a deed' (Pravopys 2019 §84, note). This is a living feature of the spoken language and of folk speech; in idioms it is the only form: дати ляпаса 'give a slap', грати в квача 'play tag', спіймати облизня 'come away empty-handed', дати драла 'take to one's heels'. Kolibaba (2023, §3.1) shows that the 2019 text widened the list (adding trees, documents, акта, вірша, довідника, персня) and argues that it should be wider still, with prepositional uses (хапатися за плуга, сісти на трактора). In the two treebanks the -а accusative is rare in written prose: 32 of 3 045 masculine inanimate accusative singulars (1.1%), among them листа (5), дуба, носа (3 each), воза, човна, рота (2 each).
2. Animate plurals with the nominative-like accusative. Names of domestic animals and some others may take the accusative plural like the nominative: пасти корови beside корів, гнати вівці beside овець, ловити мухи beside мух (Pravopys 2019 §78, note). Folk usage extends this further, to wild animals, birds, fish and insects; Kolibaba (2023, §3.2) connects its retreat with the 1933 revision of the orthography, which prescribed the genitive-like forms. In the treebanks the nominative-like animate accusative plural is 15 of 370 (4.1%), and several of these are the next case.
3. The construction піти в солдати. After в/у and за in the sense of 'become, be chosen as', an animate plural takes a form identical with the nominative: піти в солдати 'become a soldier', обрати в депутати 'elect as deputy', вийти в люди 'make one's way in the world', взяти за свідки 'take as witnesses'. It is an old accusative, and UD tags it Case=Acc (депутати twice among the 15 above).

3. Number

Ukrainian has singular and plural. Some nouns have only one of them:

• Plural-only nouns (pluralia tantum): §12.
• Singular-only nouns (singularia tantum): mass nouns (молоко 'milk', пісок 'sand', золото 'gold'), abstract nouns (сміливість 'courage', тиша 'silence'), collectives (листя 'leaves', волосся 'hair', каміння 'stones', студентство 'students as a body', птаство 'birds', дітвора 'children'), proper names. Collectives in -я with a doubled consonant (листя, гілля, коріння, пір'я) are the regular Ukrainian way to say "many X as a mass"; they agree in the neuter singular: листя пожовкло 'the leaves have turned yellow'.
• Suppletive pairs: людина — люди 'person — people', дитина — діти 'child — children', курка — кури 'hen — hens', гуска — гуси (Pravopys 2019 §100, note).

Relics of the dual. Old Ukrainian had a dual. Smal-Stockyj (1913 §§16, 20, 45) still reports dual forms of hard feminines used with 'two', and also with 'three' and 'four': дві руці 'two hands', дві нозі 'two legs' (beside дві руки, дві ноги). Today these forms are literary-archaic or dialectal, and the dual lives on in three ways: (1) the plurals очі 'eyes', плечі 'shoulders', вуха (dialectal уші) 'ears', which are old duals reinterpreted as plurals (Smal-Stockyj 1913 §45 already notes that "the feeling for the dual has been lost" in очі, уші, плечі); (2) the oblique forms очима, плечима, дверима, грошима, with the old dual ending -има (Pravopys 2019 lists плечима, дверми and дверима, грішми and грошима); (3) the stress after два, три, чотири: in careful standard speech a noun after these numerals keeps the nominative plural ending but takes the stress of the genitive singular, where the two differ: дві сестри́ (cf. nom. pl. се́стри, gen. sg. сестри́), дві руки́ (cf. ру́ки, руки́), дві ноги́. The numeral government is in 12 §11.

Plural of respect. A third-person plural verb for one respected person, typically a parent or elder, is old and still heard in village speech: Smal-Stockyj (1913 §46) gives Мама пішли до церкви 'Mother has gone to church' (lit. 'mother went-PL'). In the standard the polite plural is limited to the second person, Ви (12 §2.3).

UD counts number on noun and proper-noun tokens: IU 24 148 singular, 8 154 plural, 549 Number=Ptan; ParlaMint 23 416, 7 082 and 389.

4. The seven cases

The order above is the order of Ukrainian grammars, which number the cases 1–7 (Simovych 1919 §126: "There are seven cases in Ukrainian"). Smal-Stockyj (1913 §16) already notes that the locative "is now used only with prepositions" and that "the vocative is sometimes replaced by the nominative": both are as true today as then.

How often each case occurs. Nouns and proper nouns in UD Ukrainian 2.18, all files:

The genitive is the commonest case, more frequent than the nominative: it is the case of noun modifiers (закон України, проєкт рішення), of most prepositions, of quantities, of negation and of dates, and it stacks (розгляд проєкту закону про внесення змін 'consideration of the draft law on making changes'). The dative is the rarest after the vocative in written text. The vocative is almost nine times more frequent in parliamentary speech than in the mixed written texts of IU, because the speeches open and close with address (§5).

5. The vocative

The vocative is the form of address. It is a full case of the standard language, used in speech and writing of all registers, and one of the plainest examples of the conservatism of Ukrainian grammar (0. Introduction): the neighbouring Russian standard has lost it, Ukrainian has kept it in everyday use for every noun that can be addressed.

5.1 Forms

Singular (Pravopys 2019 §§74, 87, 95, 98):

Plural: the vocative is identical with the nominative in every declension: брати!, сестри!, друзі!, колеги!, пани та панове!. UD Ukrainian nonetheless tags plural forms in address Case=Voc, which is why ParlaMint has 737 plural vocatives (колеги 495 times, депутати 155, друзі 22).

Adjectives in address have no vocative form of their own; they take the nominative form, and UD tags them Case=Voc too: шановні колеги, дорогий друже, мій любий. Hence the most frequent "vocative" word of the parliament is the adjective шановні 'esteemed' (480 + 196 tokens).

5.2 Address formulas

The 2019 orthography codified the forms of address made of two words (Pravopys 2019 §§74, 87, notes 1–6; Kolibaba 2023, §§2.2–2.3):

Kolibaba (2023) points out an inconsistency in the 2019 text: a man's surname may stay in the nominative after a title, a woman's may not.

5.3 How the vocative is used

UD Ukrainian marks the syntactic relation vocative for words of address. Counting the singular nouns and proper nouns in that relation (2026-11-06):

In the written texts of IU the vocative is the rule (друже, мамо, дочко, чоловіче, дядечку, Боже, Господи). In the parliamentary speech of 2003–2014 half of the singular addresses are nominative forms: chairmen call speakers by first name in the nominative (Олександр 14 times beside Олександре 14 times; Сергій 11, Володимир 8, Михайло 7), while patronymics are almost always in the vocative (Михайловичу 61, Валентиновичу 15). The nominative of address in names is a feature of the public, Russian-influenced speech of those years, and of surzhyk (8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk); in the standard it is a stylistic choice only for surnames after a title (пане Коваль), and the vocative is felt to be the warmer and more correct form. The ParlaMint figures describe one institution's speech two decades ago, not the language as a whole; a newer corpus of parliamentary speech would show whether the balance has moved, and none is in Mova's collection.

The vocative of third-declension feminines (радосте, ноче) and the fourth-declension імене are rare and poetic: they belong to songs, prayers and verse (Ой ти, ноче моя), where vocatives of all kinds are frequent (37. Register and variation).

6. The four declensions

Pravopys 2019 §66 divides nouns into four declensions (відміни, vidminy) by gender and nominative ending, and §67 the first and second into three groups by the final consonant of the stem: hard (тверда), soft (м'яка) and mixed (мішана; stems in a hushing consonant ж, ч, ш, щ, дж, and some in -р).

Older grammars arranged the same material by gender: Simovych (1919, §§XVII–XXVIII) has masculine, feminine and neuter declensions, each hard, soft and "consonantal" (шелестівкова), and Smal-Stockyj (1913 §§17–25) the same eight types in German. The four-declension system is that of the Soviet-period and current school and academic grammars; the paradigms are the same, only the grouping differs.

6.1 First declension

The genitive plural has a zero ending (машин, площ, надій), with a mobile vowel inserted between two final consonants: -о- before the suffix -к (книжка — книжок, дочка — дочок, ложка — ложок) and in a few other words (гра — ігор, церква — церков, кухня — кухонь, сосна — сосон), -е- elsewhere (сестра — сестер, гривня — гривень, земля — земель, пісня — пісень, війна — воєн beside війн); loans usually take none (букв, мавп, шахт) (Pravopys 2019 §76, note 1). A small group has -ей (мишей, свиней, статей, сімей) or -ів (губ and губів).

Animate nouns take the genitive-like accusative plural (бачу сестер); the dative singular equals the locative. The genitive singular of hard nouns ends in -и and the nominative plural too; often only the stress tells them apart: сестри́ 'of the sister' vs се́стри 'sisters', книжки́ vs кни́жки, землі́ vs зе́млі (Pravopys 2019 §69, note).

6.2 Second declension, masculine

Masculines in -р are split by Pravopys 2019 §67 among the three groups: most are hard (двір — двору, сир — сиру, all loans in -ер, -ор, -ур: інженер — інженера, директор, професор); many in -ар, -ир are soft (лікар — лікаря, кобзар — кобзаря, секретар — секретаря); names of trades in -яр with shifting stress are mixed (школяр — школяра, каменяр — каменяра, voc. школяре). Ігор is soft (Ігоря, voc. Ігорю), as is Лазар. The stress decides маляр: ма́ляр — ма́ляра (hard) vs маля́р — маляра́ (mixed).

The nominative plural ends in -и (hard), -і (soft, mixed); друг has друзі, вухо вуха; nouns in -анин, -янин lose the suffix: киянин — кияни, селянин — селяни, громадянин — громадяни (§88). The genitive plural is -ів/-їв for masculines, with a zero ending beside it in a few (чобіт and чоботів, ват and ватів; in speech also п'ять раз beside the standard разів), and -ей in гість — гостей, кінь — коней, людина/люди — людей.

6.3 Second declension, neuter

Neuters in -ння, -ття, -ддя (знання, питання, почуття, знаряддя) are the commonest neuter type in modern text; their genitive plural is zero with a single consonant (питань, знань, умінь) or -ів (почуттів, життів). The hard neuter genitive plural has the zero ending with the о/е → і alternation of §7: село — сіл, колесо — коліс, слово — слів, озеро — озер; вікно — вікон inserts о.

6.4 Third declension

The instrumental singular ends in -ю and lengthens a single final consonant of the stem after a vowel: тінню, ніччю, сіллю, Руссю, Уманню, подорожжю; it does not lengthen after a consonant cluster or a labial or р (радістю, кров'ю, любов'ю, матір'ю, верф'ю), where the labial and р take the apostrophe (Pravopys 2019 §95.3). The о/е of the oblique stem alternates with і in the closed syllable of the nominative and instrumental: ніч — ночі, піч — печі, сіль — солі, осінь — осені, радість — радості. The genitive and dative singular -ости is the 2019 variant (§10).

6.5 Fourth declension

The -ят- nouns name the young of animals and people: теля, лоша 'foal', ягня 'lamb', курча 'chick', кошеня 'kitten', гуся 'gosling', дівча 'girl', хлоп'я 'lad', дитя 'child'. The class is productive with -еня/-ня/-а (ведмежа, вовченя, мишеня, левеня) and gives diminutives in -ятко (кошенятко, теля́тко) (17). In the accusative plural, persons take the genitive form (бачу дівчат), animals both (гусят and гусята), things the nominative (коліщата) (Pravopys 2019 §99.4). The -ен- group is small: ім'я, плем'я 'tribe', вим'я 'udder', сім'я 'seed', тім'я 'crown of the head'; all but ім'я and плем'я have plural forms of the second declension (вим'я, вим'їв).

7. Vowel alternations in the stem

Inflection moves the stem's vowels. The alternations are regular enough to be predicted from the syllable structure and are part of every paradigm:

The о/е ~ і alternation is the most characteristic sound pattern of Ukrainian inflection, and its source is historical (the lengthening of о, е before a lost weak ъ, ь, 9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today). It explains why the nominative often looks unlike the rest of the paradigm (кінь vs коня, коні, коней). Not every і alternates: хліб — хліба, лід — льоду (with ьо), дід — діда (from old ѣ, not from о), зміст — змісту; loans do not alternate (гол — гола, ром — рому). The alternation also fails in some new words and in some surnames, and the 2019 text has variants (Коваліве beside Ковалеве for the vocative of an adjectival surname), which Kolibaba (2023, §2.3) argues against because they break the alternation rule.

In the dative and locative of first-declension nouns in -га, -ка, -ха, the softening to з, ц, с before -і is the norm (на дорозі, у руці, на мусі, дочці, Ользі).

8. The masculine genitive singular: -а or -у

Second-declension masculines with a consonant stem have two genitive endings, -а/-я and -у/-ю, and the choice depends on meaning. It is the hardest point of Ukrainian noun morphology for learners and for machines, and Pravopys 2019 gives it the longest paragraph of the noun chapter (§82). In outline:

-а/-я (the "concrete" ending) for:

• all animate nouns: брата, учня, Тараса, Андрія, вовка, personified Вітра, Мороза;
• concrete things and units: trees (дуба, клена, ясеня), tools, machines and their parts (ножа, ключа, вагона, комп'ютера), measures (метра, грама, кілограма), coins and currencies (долара, цента, франка), months and days (січня, понеділка, дня, тижня), numerals used as nouns (мільйона, десятка), body parts (носа, рота, живота), geometrical and grammatical terms (трикутника, іменника, прикметника), most nouns with the suffixes -ник, -ок, -ець, -ень;
• town names with the suffixes -ськ-, -цьк-, -ець-, -бург-, -град-/-город-, -піль-/-поль-, -мир-, -слав-, -фурт- and with possessive suffixes -ів-/-їв-, -ев-, -ов-, -ин-/-ін-: Луцька, Донецька, Тернополя, Житомира, Ярослава, Львова, Харкова, Києва;
• websites and mail services: фейсбука, ютуба, імейла (added in 2019).

-у/-ю (the "abstract" ending) for:

• abstract nouns, feelings, illnesses, processes, states, social phenomena: болю, гніву, жаху, сміху, грипу, аналізу, прогресу, розвитку, успіху, народу, уряду, закону;
• substances and materials: піску, меду, цукру, спирту, азоту, цукру (but хліба, concrete);
• collectives and places, buildings, rooms, institutions: лісу, саду, гаю, степу, будинку, вокзалу, заводу, палацу, даху, коридору;
• most prefixed and compound nouns that are not animate: виступу, прикладу, водогону, рукопису;
• names of countries, regions, rivers, lakes, mountains and towns abroad: Алжиру (country), Кавказу, Дунаю, Донбасу, Китаю and, as the main form since 2019, Лондону, Парижу, Мадриду, Амстердаму, Чорнобилю, with Лондона, Парижа allowed as variants.

Both, with a difference of meaning: акта 'deed (document)' vs акту 'act (action)', листа 'letter' vs листу 'leaf, sheet as material', моста 'bridge (object)' vs мосту, блока (part) vs блоку (alliance), Алжира, Туніса, Нью-Йорка (city) vs Алжиру, Тунісу, Нью-Йорку (country, state), звука (term) vs звуку (sound), каменя (one stone) vs каменю (material), Духа (the Holy Spirit) vs духу 'spirit, courage'.

The UD counts show the balance in running text. Masculine singular genitives of nouns (2026-11-06, both treebanks, all files):

(The "other" forms are nouns whose genitive is not in -а/-у: substantivised adjectives such as лютого, abbreviations, and indeclinables.) Animates take -а without exception. Among inanimates -у has 78% in IU and 90% in the parliament: the abstract and institutional vocabulary of politics (року 269, часу 87, народу 80, закону 79 + 116 capitalised, проекту 72, розвитку 71, комітету 70, уряду 66) is the -у class, and -а among inanimates is mostly months (грудня, березня, листопада), дня, and concrete nouns.

City names abroad: the norm ahead of usage. The 2019 rule for foreign town names reinstated the -у ending of the 1928 orthography as the main form, keeping -а as a variant (Kolibaba 2023, §1.1.1, tells the history: the -у forms Лондону, Парижу stood in the 1928 code and the dictionaries of the 1920s, were removed in 1933, and the 1993 text knew only -а). In the news of 2024 the codified main form is the minority form:

The -у counts are upper bounds, since Лондону, Парижу are also datives. Here, unusually, the codified norm is ahead of usage, and the variant clause of the 2019 rule describes what writers actually do. This is not the case for Ukrainian towns with the suffixes listed above: Харків — Харкова, Львів — Львова, Київ — Києва have only -а, and Харкову, Львову, Києву are datives (Харкова 1 079, Харкову 411 in the same news sample, nearly all the latter in phrases like Харкову допомагають).

9. Other masculine endings with variants

Dative singular: -ові/-еві/-єві and -у/-ю are both standard for masculines (братові and брату, учителеві and учителю, Петрові and Петру); towns in -ів, -ов, -ин take only -у (Києву, Львову, Батурину). Pravopys 2019 §83 recommends alternating them when several datives follow one another, -ові first: Симоненкові Олесю Андрійовичу, панові капітану. The 2019 text added -ові as a variant for surnames in -ин (Волошину and Волошинові). Usage prefers -у: in the treebanks, animate masculine datives are -у/-ю 472 times and -ові/-еві 79 times; in the 2024 news президенту has 387 tokens and президентові 45.

Locative singular: -і is the default for inanimates (на столі, у лісі, в акті), -у/-ю after stems with the suffixes -к-, -ок-, -ик- (у будинку, на літаку, у ставку) and for stressed endings (у гаю, на снігу, у степу, на льоду), and -ові/-еві for animates (на батькові, при вчителеві); many nouns have two forms (у саду and у саді, у лісі and у лісу, у потязі and у потягу, по місту and по місті) (Pravopys 2019 §86). Treebank counts: inanimate masculine locatives -і 1 242, -у/-ю 466, -ові 77.

Instrumental singular: -ом (hard), -ем/-єм (soft and mixed): дубом, ножем, краєм, учителем; Slavic surnames of possessive form in -ів, -ов, -ев, -ин take -им (Ковалевим, Петровим, Лесиним), non-Slavic ones -ом (Дарвіном, Чапліном, Бюловом), and surnames in -енко, -ко the ordinary -ом (Шевченком, Франком) (Pravopys 2019 §85).

Nominative plural after два, три, чотири: the 2019 text restored a note of the 1928 code that masculine nouns after 2–4 take the nominative plural ending -и/-і (два хлопці, три робітники, чотири слухачі), not the genitive singular -а of the Russian model (*два мільйона, *три учня). In the treebanks the norm holds: 96 masculine nouns after два, три, чотири, обидва in the nominative or accusative are plural, 2 have the -а form (три президента in the parliament of 2003–2014, and one phrase with обидва in IU). In the 2024 news два мільйони has 51 tokens and два мільйона none, три мільйони 23 and три мільйона 1.

10. The 2019 orthography and the noun: what changed and what usage does

Kolibaba (2023) separates the 2019 changes in noun morphology into true changes (rules absent from the 1993 text) and corrections. The true changes, with what the corpora show:

The -ости genitive is the clearest case of the 2019 approach: it restores a form of the 1928 orthography and of much of the pre-war literature, dropped in 1933, as a variant, and leaves the choice to writers. Kolibaba (2023, §1.1.2) gives its background: it is widespread in the dialects and was common in the literary practice of the 19th and early 20th centuries; in the 1990s and 2000s some writers used it selectively and deliberately, as a mark of loyalty to the pre-Soviet norm. In current news it is almost absent; in IU, which includes texts from the first half of the 20th century and from the diaspora tradition, it is 8% of these genitives. The variant lives in a sphere (some literary, scholarly and diaspora writing) rather than in the language at large. Kolibaba also notes that the 2019 text did not extend the logic to the fourth declension (імени, племени, both in the 1928 code). Note that -осте is not a genitive: it is the vocative (радосте, §5).

11. Indeclinable nouns

Nouns that do not inflect are of three kinds:

1. Loans ending in a vowel other than -а after a consonant: кафе, кашне, шосе, таксі, журі, поні, меню, інтерв'ю, рагу, шоу, бюро, депо, кіно, метро, радіо, какао, кредо, амплуа (Pravopys 2019 §140). By tradition three loans in -о decline: вино́, пальто́, ситро́ (у пальті, вина).
2. Abbreviations and acronyms read letter by letter or as words: ЗМІ, США, ООН, ТЕС, АЕС; some acronyms read as words decline as masculines (вуз — вузу, загс — загсу, ЦУМ — ЦУМу). UD tags 834 noun tokens and 554 proper nouns Uninflect=Yes; most are abbreviations and symbols (% 99, № 55, р. 48, грн 39, УПА 21). The full-word indeclinable common nouns in the treebanks are few: пані 7, дідо 6, відео 6, кіно 5, медіа 3, леді 3, піаніно 2, кіло 2.
3. Women's surnames in a consonant or -о (з Оксаною Коваль, Ганні Шевченко) and foreign proper names in a vowel (Гете, Россіні, Тбілісі, Торонто), and women's foreign first names in a hard consonant (Кармен, Ірен, Маргарет); those in a labial or soft consonant decline (Ізабель — Ізабелі, Ніколь — Ніколі).

VESUM marks 17 574 noun lemma lines nv (indeclinable); most are abbreviations and proper names.

Declined loans in -о. Shvedova (2020) traces declined and undeclined forms of авто, бюро, кіно, депо, піаніно, фортепіано, радіо and others through the 500-million-token GRAC corpus. Her findings, in our words: declining them (в авті, у кіні, бюра) was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries on both sides of the border (Franko wrote бюра, бюрі far more often than бюро; even the purist Nechui-Levytskyi declined піаніно), and the 1928 orthography codified it for several words; after the Second World War texts written in Soviet Ukraine kept almost only the indeclinable form, while the diaspora went on declining these nouns, inconsistently; since the late 1980s declined forms have come back in Ukraine, first as a mark of western or diaspora style, but in the 2010–2017 press of Kyiv and Lviv alike they stay under 5%. She expects that corpus-based norming will one day make the declined variant standard, and notes that the 2019 orthography still declines only вино, пальто, ситро. The 2024 news confirms the picture: в авті 57 against в авто 720 (7%); у бюрі 0 against у бюро 49; у кіно/в кіно 491 and у кіні none; while the officially declinable пальто is split, у пальті 16 and у пальто/в пальто 12.

12. Plural-only nouns

Pravopys 2019 §100 gives the declension of plural-only nouns by their nominative ending:

The genitive has -ей (грошей, дверей, саней, людей), -ів (окулярів, джинсів, фінансів, Чернівців, граблів and грабель) or zero (воріт, дров, канікул, ножиць, Сум). The instrumental of several has the old -ми/-има: дверима and дверми, грошима and грішми, ворітьми and воротами, дітьми, людьми, саньми (§100.5).

In UD the commonest plural-only lemmas are вибори 'election' (169), кошти 'funds' (69), гроші 'money' (57), дані 'data' (46), надра 'subsoil' (44), двері (30), переговори 'negotiations' (27), відносини 'relations' (27), збори 'meeting' (23), груди 'chest' (14), фінанси (11), Карпати (10). UD also tags the polite ви as Number=Ptan (120 tokens). VESUM marks 5 977 noun lemma lines ns (no singular).

Counting plural-only nouns needs collective numerals: двоє дверей, троє саней, одні двері, одні окуляри (12 §12).

13. How Mova handles nouns

The English parser. en xpos-fill reduces a Ukrainian noun to NN or NNS (or NNP/NNPS) by its Number feature (xpos_of in en/src/main.rs); case, gender and animacy are dropped from the tag. The parser learns attachments without them. On UD Ukrainian IU dev (2026-11-06, binary of 2026-10-22) the tagger is 92.96% accurate, and its most frequent errors are singular/plural confusions of nouns (NNS → NN 148, NN → NNS 126 on 12 606 tokens): the forms in -и/-і that are both genitive singular and nominative plural (книжки, землі, машини) are exactly where number cannot be read off the form. A parser that saw the case would also attach better: the genitive modifier chains of §4 and the vocative of §5 are signalled by case alone. LAS is 73.43 with predicted tags and 78.17 with gold tags on IU, 79.28 and 81.34 on ParlaMint. There is no Ukrainian lemmatiser or inflector in en; the lemma column of the training data is not used for Ukrainian.

The kg crate. kg/src/morph.rs loads VESUM (dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2) twice: first the analyses of every form in the input vocabulary, then all forms of the lemmas found, so that it can synthesise a form back from (lemma, grammar). Each analysis carries a 32-bit Gram (kg/src/gram.rs) with case (3 bits, the seven VESUM values v_naz, v_rod, v_dav, v_zna, v_oru, v_mis, v_kly), number, gender (m, f, n; a VESUM p noun gets plural number and no gender) and animacy (anim, inanim, and unanim for both). The parser kg/src/uk.rs uses them as follows:

• Case decides the role. A noun in v_naz can be the subject; v_zna, v_dav, v_oru, v_rod objects are tried in that order (OBJ_CASE_ORDER); after a preposition the locative is preferred, then accusative, instrumental, genitive, dative (PP_CASE_ORDER), but after a pronoun (у мене, в нього) or з/із/зі the genitive comes first (PP_PRON_CASE_ORDER).
• Government from VESUM. Verbs and prepositions carry rv_* comments in VESUM (rv_zna:rv_mis for на); governs checks the object's case against them, and lets a negated transitive verb take the genitive (не бачу книжки). A unit test checks this rule both ways.
• Genitive singular vs accusative plural. For -и forms like книжки after a verb that allows the genitive, the parser prefers the genitive singular reading (gen_sg in uk.rs).
• Animacy agreement. An adjective in the accusative must agree in animacy with its noun (the check on line 157 of uk.rs), which separates бачу нового учня from impossible combinations.
• Not handled: the vocative never reaches the parser, because address needs commas and sentences with commas are rejected; the genitive of time (минулої осені is taken as an object, README); substantivised adjectives; indeclinable nouns are analysed (VESUM lists all their case readings) but the nv flag is not kept; the -а/-у choice of §8 is not a rule anywhere, only a fact of the VESUM paradigm of each noun, and VESUM's variants (Лондона/Лондону) are both accepted.

The generator (kg/src/textgen.rs) synthesises the noun form from lemma and Gram and, where VESUM has several forms for one cell (variants such as -ові/-у, радості/радости), chooses by the frequency of (lemma, grammar) → form in the parsed sentences. Variant choice is thus learned from data, not set by a norm.

What would be needed. A Ukrainian tag set with case, gender, number and animacy in the tagger; a lemmatiser and inflector with open data (VESUM is CC BY-NC-SA and cannot be in a release; the paradigms of this chapter and Pravopys 2019, which is free to reuse, are a starting point; Babych 2019 shows how a small set of inflection tables plus an unannotated corpus can generate paradigms for new names and neologisms, the open end of the lexicon that a static dictionary misses); a rule for the -а/-у genitive with its semantic classes; and a vocative check for address.

Sources for this chapter

• Український правопис (2019), Cabinet of Ministers resolution No. 437 of 22.05.2019, §§66–100, 140. Official document, not protected by copyright. Library books/u/uk/ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019 (uk-gram-pravopys-2019).
• Simovych, Vasyl. 1919. Граматика української мови для самонавчання та в допомогу шкільній науці. §§120–126 and chapters XVII–XXVIII. Public domain. Library books/s/si/simovych-1919-hramatyka-ukrainskoi-movy-dlia (uk-gram-simovych-1919).
• Smal-Stockyj, Stephan. 1913. Ruthenische Grammatik. §§16–26, 45–47. Public domain. Library books/s/st/stockyj-1913-ruthenische-grammatik (uk-gram-smal-stockyj-1913).
• Kolibaba, L. M. 2023. Зміни в унормуванні закінчень відмінюваних слів в «Українському правописі» 2019 року. Українська мова 1(85): 68–99. doi.org/10.15407/ukrmova2023.01.068. Library card CC BY 4.0; the article prints CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so paraphrased only (kolibaba-2023-zakinchennia-pravopys).
• Shvedova, M. O. 2020. Граматичне освоєння запозичених іменників із кінцевим -о в українській мові: корпусне дослідження. Українська мова 2(74): 13–30. doi.org/10.15407/ukrmova2020.02.013. Library card CC BY 4.0; the article prints CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so paraphrased only (shvedova-2020-zapozycheni-na-o).
• Kozyrieva, Z. H. 2023. До питання моделювання іменника в «Словнику української мови» в 4 т. (АСУМ). Лексикографічний бюлетень 32: 134–198. CC BY 4.0 (kozyrieva-2023-model-imennyka-asum): how the current academic dictionary records a noun's grammar (gender label, genitive ending, plural-only and collective marks); read for the dictionary conventions, no specific claim rests on it.
• Babych, Bogdan. 2019. Unsupervised induction of Ukrainian morphological paradigms for the new lexicon. CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology) (babych-2019-unsupervised-induction-ukrainian-morphological-paradigms).
• UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only) and ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0), ud-treebanks-v2.18; VESUM dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only); Leipzig ukr_news_2024 1M (CC BY, Goldhahn, Eckart & Quasthoff 2012). Counts of 2026-11-06.
• Mova: en/src/main.rs (xpos_of), kg/src/gram.rs, kg/src/morph.rs, kg/src/uk.rs (OBJ_CASE_ORDER, PP_CASE_ORDER, PP_PRON_CASE_ORDER, governs), kg/src/textgen.rs, kg — the Mova knowledge graph.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/