Caccia alle uova di Pasqua in italiano facile

Why is “uovo” masculine but “uova” feminine?

The Italian egg changes sex when you crack more than one. Singular l’uovo is masculine and ends in -o, exactly as a learner expects. But the plural is not the tidy uovi — it is le uova, feminine and ending in -a. So “an egg” and “the eggs” disagree on gender, and the plural takes the feminine article le. It is one of Italian’s most quietly weird nouns.

The quirk is a fossil of Latin, where ovum was neuter and its plural ova ended in -a; modern Italian inherited that -a but reassigned it to the feminine. A small family does the same trick: il dito / le dita (finger/fingers), il braccio / le braccia (arm/arms), l’osso / le ossa (bone/bones).