Hospital hygiene

Two nouns on this list are recent borrowings and still sound foreign in a German sentence: die Surveillance, the systematic counting of infections, and die Compliance, how faithfully staff keep the rules. The first is pronounced the French way, the second the English way, and both are feminine. That is a pattern, not luck. German has a large family of Latinate nouns ending in -anz and -enz, and every one of them is feminine: die Distanz, die Toleranz, die Resistenz, die Inzidenz. Nouns borrowed with the ending -ance join that family, so die Balance, die Performance and die Governance can be given their article on sight. A learner who says der Surveillance has not made an unlucky guess; he has broken a rule that was there to be used. Neither word has a plural in ordinary use.