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).