Alumna or alumnus?

alumna is a noun meaning “A female pupil or student (especially of a university or college)”; alumnus is a noun meaning “A male pupil or student”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) alumnus is about 2.8 times as common as alumna.

alumnaoralumnus

What is the difference between alumna and alumnus?

	alumna	alumnus
Part of speech	noun	noun
Meaning	A female pupil or student (especially of a university or college) A female graduate	A male pupil or student A male graduate
Example	none recorded	none recorded
Forms	alumni, alumnas, alumnae	alumni, alumnuses
Pronunciation	/əˈlʌmnə/	/əˈlʌmnəs/
In writing	about once in every 3 million words	about once in every 1 million words

Sources: alumna and alumnus in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Every current meaning of alumna and alumnus

alumna

1
noun A female pupil or student (especially of a university or college)
2
noun A female graduate

alumnus

1
noun A male pupil or student
2
noun A male graduate
3
noun A student of any gender
4
noun A graduate of any gender

Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.

Which is more common, alumna or alumnus?

alumna appears about once in every 3 million words; alumnus about once in every 1 million words.

0.0010.010.11101001,00010,000

rarerper million words of written Englishmore common

alumna about once in every 3 million wordsalumnus about once in every 1 million words

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How many people search alumna vs alumnus?

“alumna vs alumnus” is searched about 20 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.

Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.