Mozzarella Sticks aus dem Airfryer

Why is “Airfryer” masculine (“der Airfryer”) in German?

A recipe for crispy mozzarella sticks names its equipment in English: der Airfryer. Recipes and everyday speech often reach for the English name rather than the German alternative, Heißluftfritteuse (“hot-air fryer”) — both are standard and recognized by German dictionaries, but “Airfryer” is the shorter, more common one in casual use. Like most borrowed tech nouns, it gets a German grammatical gender by default — almost always der (masculine), the same default der Laptop, der Computer, and der Toaster get. The word stays English; only the article and the capital letter (all German nouns are capitalized) mark it as naturalized.

This masculine default isn’t a hard rule — gender assignment for loanwords is famously inconsistent in German and occasionally split by region or generation. What is consistent: once a loanword is naturalized, it takes full German grammar, including plural forms (die Airfryer, no “-s”) and compounding (die Airfryer-Reinigung, “airfryer cleaning”).