Rooms, stays and extra charges

Near the end of this list sits la password, and the only hard thing about it is the article. An English noun taken into Italian keeps its spelling and roughly its sound, but it cannot keep what « password » has at home, which is no gender at all. Every Italian noun is masculine or feminine, and a borrowed one is sorted the moment somebody puts an article in front of it. The sorting is not random. A loan takes the gender of the Italian word standing behind it — the word the speaker would otherwise have reached for. Behind la password stands la parola, and that is why the sentence on this page runs la password è dietro alla scheda, with una password lunga beside it. Where no such word is felt, the loan falls to the masculine, which is why the same list gives il check-in and il check-out. The same rule puts la mail behind la posta and la star behind la stella, against il computer and il weekend. So the article is not decoration: it records which Italian word the borrowed one stepped into.