The history of the language lecture 3 Noun in Old English

The nouns of this group are: masculine: mere (sea), mete (food); neuter: sife (sieve), hilt (hilt); feminine: wiht (thing), hyde (hide), woruld (world, age).

Nouns belonging to -u-stems may be of masculine or feminine gender:
The nouns of this group are: masculine: wudu (wood), medu (honey); feminine: nosu (nose), hand (hand).
-o- and -u- stems in Old English had only three distinctive endings both for the singular and the plural and that was sufficient for proper communication. -i- stems, on the other hand, illustrate the tendency to dissolution of the former classes of nouns and a certain tendency for regrouping the declensions according to the gender of the noun.
Weak Declension
This class of nouns consists of a rather numerous group of nouns originally having - n-stems; the suffix is well-preserved in declension of nouns in Old English, but disappeared in the nominative case. -n- stem nouns may be of all three genders.
Examples: masculine: wita (wise man), steorra (star), flota (ship, fleet), neuter: cofa (chamber, repositary). feminine: heorte (heart), sunne (sun), hearpe (harp).
Root Stems. 
This group comprises the nouns that never had a stem suffix. The group was not numerous, but the words belonging to it were characterized by high frequency of use.
The nouns of this class are: all compound nouns containing the morpheme man: wimman (woman), ealdorman (nobleman, leader),and also fōt (foot), mūs (mouse). The nouns belonging to -r-stems were of masculine and feminine gender, the group is a closed system. Ex. are dohtor (daughter), sweostor (sister)
Most nouns and adjectives in PG, and also many verbs, had stem-forming suffixes; according to stem-suffixes they fell into groups, or classes: a-stems, i-stems, o-stems, etc. This grouping accounts for the formation of different declensions in nouns and adjectives, and for some differences in the conjugation of verbs.

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