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Those Germans, they have a word for everything!
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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The association between gender and the noun is in large part (albeit not completely) arbitrary. In this case, since Halter is a "masculine" noun, the compound Büstenhalter is "masculine" too. So it gets the "masculine" article der.
If it helps, instead of looking at German genders as "masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter", look at them as "der gender vs. die gender vs. das gender".
Just don't look for "butter".
Wo ist der Bu... die B... fein, wo ist das gelbe Ding?
Jokes aside, it's common in gendered languages to have a handful of nouns with a variable gender. In this case, it was likely caused by regularisation; the word is originally feminine but it looks masculine, so eventually you got people using the masculine with it.
(I think that der Butter is specially common in Ba-Wü and Switzerland, but I'm not too sure.)
For reference, examples of the same happening in other languages:
At least in castillian "la mar" is only used in poetry and phrases like "me cago en la mar" or "la mar de bonito", otherwise is always masculine as you said.
I like calling them "noun classes"
That works too. Perhaps even better than calling them "genders", as if this sort of system was exclusively related to social gender. (Often a grammatical gender / noun class system has nothing to do with social gender; cue to Bantu languages.)