The Spanish nouns ELLA players get wrong most often

ELLA is a game where you tap el or la for each Spanish noun. This page summarises the answers players have given — what we see, not what every learner does. Data as of 6 October 2026 · 26,728 answers · 512 nouns

The short version

The 20 most-missed nouns (with at least 50 attempts) were answered correctly between 35% and 50% of the time.
The biggest pattern: masculine nouns ending in -ma — 54% correct, against 92% for 116 ordinary feminine nouns ending in -a.
Words with similar percentages shouldn’t be read as ranked against each other; the list is a description, not a league table.

Most-missed nouns in ELLA

Listed from lowest observed accuracy. Only nouns with at least 50 attempts are included, and only nouns whose gender we have checked in the RAE’s dictionary. These are plain gameplay percentages, not estimates.

The 20 Spanish nouns with the lowest accuracy in ELLA, with article, grammatical gender, accuracy and attempts
Noun	Article	Gender	Correct	Attempts
corrientecurrent	la	feminine	35%	69
águilaeagle	el	feminine	37%	57
esquemadiagram	el	masculine	40%	55
hablaspeech	el	feminine	41%	79
panoramapanorama	el	masculine	42%	55
cumbresummit	la	feminine	42%	52
costumbrehabit	la	feminine	42%	73
motomotorbike	la	feminine	43%	118
aulaclassroom	el	feminine	43%	136
sofásofa	el	masculine	44%	52
fuentefountain	la	feminine	45%	69
hachaaxe	el	feminine	46%	130
idiomalanguage	el	masculine	47%	62
traumatrauma	el	masculine	47%	87
imagenimage	la	feminine	47%	97
dilemadilemma	el	masculine	47%	78
almasoul	el	feminine	49%	86
basebase	la	feminine	50%	119
suerteluck	la	feminine	50%	106
posepose	la	feminine	50%	90

Nouns whose gender is ambiguous or differs by region or meaning (for example arte, clave and margen) are left out on purpose.

Patterns worth noticing

A pattern appears here only if the group has plenty of attempts and sits well below its comparison group. These describe ELLA’s own word list and how people played it; they are not rules about Spanish.

Masculine nouns ending in -ma

54% correct across 1,015 attempts on 16 nouns, versus 92% for 116 ordinary feminine nouns ending in -a (5,377 attempts). The -a ending usually points toward feminine — the RAE gives that as the general rule, with examples such as casa — and these nouns break the expectation: they are masculine. The RAE notes that Greek-origin -ma words such as clima and esquema are masculine. The comparison group is every ELLA noun that ends in -a, is feminine in every sense listed in the DLE, and isn’t a special case. Inside the group the range is wide: esquema at 40% (55 attempts) to drama at 76% (54 attempts).

Feminine nouns that take “el”

54% correct across 889 attempts on 10 nouns, versus 84% for ELLA’s other nouns (24,345 attempts). These nouns are feminine; el is simply the article form used before a stressed initial /a/ (el agua, but still agua fría). See the guide. Inside the group the range is wide: águila at 37% (57 attempts) to hambre at 82% (83 attempts).

Think you can beat these? Try the 10 hardest.10 nouns · same words, same order · about 20 seconds

How to read this data

Descriptive gameplay results, not population estimates. The percentages describe what happened in ELLA games. They are not estimates for Spanish learners in general, they come from people who chose to play, and nothing here shows that playing ELLA teaches anything.
Attempts are not independent observations. Each answer counts once, but one player can answer the same word many times, enthusiastic players contribute far more answers than occasional ones, and first attempts are not separated from repeat attempts. For that reason no margin of error or significance is shown.
Uneven exposure. Words reach players through the Daily challenge, Sprint, Survival and Zen in different amounts, so some words have far more attempts than others. Friend and class challenges are not counted.
Time pressure counts. In Survival, running out of time counts as a miss, so a miss can mean “didn’t know” or “too slow”.
Small differences mean little. Words are included from 50 attempts upward, and words with similar percentages shouldn’t be treated as ranked.
A hand-picked word list. ELLA’s ~500 nouns were chosen, with the tricky ones over-represented; they are not a random sample of Spanish nouns.
Gender comes from the dictionary, not from ELLA’s answer key. Every noun shown was checked in the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española on 6 October 2026. Nouns whose gender is ambiguous or varies by region or meaning are excluded. The data refreshes about once a day.