In another in our series of blog posts on Spanish nouns whose gender varies according to meaning we look at coma in its non-specialist senses.
You can listen to the pronunciation of coma in the audio clip below:
Un coma is masculine, despite the -a ending, when it means a coma, as in a prolonged state of unconsciousness:
Estuvo en un coma inducido durante una semana.
She was in an induced coma for a week.
Una coma is feminine when it means a comma, as in the punctuation mark:
No te olvides de poner la coma en el lugar correcto.
Don’t forget to put the comma in the right place.
Remember to make any articles and adjectives agree in gender and number with the noun they modify:
un coma profundo
a deep coma
una coma itálica
an italic comma.
DID YOU KNOW?
In Spanish commas are sometimes used where in English we’d use decimal points:
6,5 (seis coma cinco)
6.5 (six point five).
Come back next week to learn about another Spanish noun whose gender varies according to sense.
