abricot

Abricot is masculine. While it does derive from Arabic "al-birquq" (the apricot), the explanation for its masculine gender is speculative. The word was adopted into French via Spanish "albaricoque" in the 16th century. French noun gender is not reliably determined by source language articles; the masculine gender of "abricot" is better explained as either: (1) analogy with other masculine fruit names in French, or (2) the arbitrary gender assignment that occurred during lexicalization. The claim that the Arabic article "al-" directly influenced gender retention is linguistically questionable, as gender assignment in borrowing typically follows the borrowing language's patterns rather than source language morphology.