• Collective Nouns
• Verbs
• Adjectives
• What Are Nouns

Definition

A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea. Whatever exists, we assume, can be named, and that name is a noun. A proper noun, which names a specific person, place, or thing (Carlos, Queen Marguerite, Middle East, Jerusalem, Malaysia, Presbyterianism, God, Spanish, Buddhism, the Republican Party), is almost always capitalized. A proper noun used as an addressed person's name is called a noun of address. Common nouns name everything else, things that usually are not capitalized.

A group of related words can act as a single noun-like entity within a sentence. A Noun Clause contains a subject and verb and can do anything that a noun can do:

Nouns are words that indicate a person, place, or thing. In a sentence, nouns can function as the subject or the object of a verb or preposition. Nouns can also follow linking verbs to rename or re-identify the subject of a sentence or clause; these are known as predicate nouns. Wondering what is a noun? They are a person, place or thing, but can be a bit more in-depth than that. Make understanding easy with noun explanations.

What he does for this town is a blessing.

1. It's a busy busy time of year in schools! With the upcoming rush of holidays, it can be a challenge to keep.
2. Nouns are words that refer to people, places, and things. Most grade school students can tell you this. But the study of nouns gets a little more complex. There are many types of nouns such as common and proper, singular and plural, and abstract and concrete. It is helpful to know these distinctions when studying language.
3. What do archeologist study? .

A Noun Phrase, frequently a noun accompanied by modifiers, is a group of related words acting as a noun: the oil depletion allowance; the abnormal, hideously enlarged nose.

There is a separate section on word combinations that become Compound Nouns — such as daughter-in-law, half-moon, and stick-in-the-mud.

Categories of Nouns

Nouns can be classified further as count nouns, which name anything that can be counted (four books, two continents, a few dishes, a dozen buildings); mass nouns (or non-count nouns), which name something that can't be counted (water, air, energy, blood); and collective nouns, which can take a singular form but are composed of more than one individual person or items (jury, team, class, committee, herd). We should note that some words can be either a count noun or a non-count noun depending on how they're being used in a sentence:

1. He got into trouble. (non-count)
2. He had many troubles. (countable)
3. Experience (non-count) is the best teacher.
4. We had many exciting experiences (countable) in college.

Whether these words are count or non-count will determine whether they can be used with articles and determiners or not. (We would not write 'He got into the troubles,' but we could write about 'The troubles of Ireland.'

Some texts will include the category of abstract nouns, by which we mean the kind of word that is not tangible, such as warmth, justice, grief, and peace. Abstract nouns are sometimes troublesome for non-native writers because they can appear with determiners or without: 'Peace settled over the countryside.' 'The skirmish disrupted the peace that had settled over the countryside.' See the section on Plurals for additional help with collective nouns, words that can be singular or plural, depending on context.

Forms of Nouns

Nouns can be in the subjective, possessive, and objective case. The word case defines the role of the noun in the sentence. Is it a subject, an object, or does it show possession?

• The English professor [subject] is tall.
• He chose the English professor [object].
• The English professor's [possessive] car is green.

Nouns in the subject and object role are identical in form; nouns that show the possessive, however, take a different form. Usually an apostrophe is added followed by the letter s (except for plurals, which take the plural '-s' ending first, and then add the apostrophe). See the section on Possessives for help with possessive forms. There is also a table outlining the cases of nouns and pronouns.

Almost all nouns change form when they become plural, usually with the simple addition of an -s or -es. Unfortunately, it's not always that easy, and a separate section on Plurals offers advice on the formation of plural noun forms.

Assaying for Nouns*

Back in the gold rush days, every little town in the American Old West had an assayer's office, a place where wild-eyed prospectors could take their bags of ore for official testing, to make sure the shiny stuff they'd found was the real thing, not 'fool's gold.' We offer here some assay tests for nouns. There are two kinds of tests: formal and functional — what a word looks like (the endings it takes) and how a word behaves in a sentence.

• Formal Tests
  1. Does the word contain a noun-making morpheme? organization, misconception, weirdness, statehood, government, democracy, philistinism, realtor, tenacity, violinist
  2. Can the word take a plural-making morpheme? pencils, boxes
  3. Can the word take a possessive-making morpheme? today's, boys'
• Function Tests
  4. Without modifiers, can the word directly follow an article and create a grammatical unit (subject, object, etc.)? the state, an apple, a crate
  5. Can it fill the slot in the following sentence: '(The) _________ seem(s) all right.' (or substitute other predicates such as unacceptable, short, dark, depending on the word's meaning)?

Testing the Tests:

With most nouns, the test is clear. 'State,' for example, can be a plural ('states'), become a possessive ('state's'), follow an article ('a/the state'), and fit in the slot ('the state seems all right'). It doesn't have a noun-making morpheme, but it passes all the other tests; it can pass as a noun. (The fact that 'state' can also be a verb — 'We state our case' — is not relevant.) 'Greyness' cannot take plural ending nor can it be possessive, but it does contain a noun-making morphene and it can follow an article and fit in the slot sentence. Can the word 'grey,' which is obviously also an adjective, be a noun? It's hard to imagine it passing any of the formal tests, but it can follow an article and fill the slot: 'The grey seems acceptable.' And what about 'running,' which is often part of a verb (He is running for office)? Again, it won't pass the formal tests, but it will fit the slot sentence: 'Running is all right.' (It can also follow an article, but in rather an odd way: 'The running is about to begin.') 'Grey' and 'running' are nouns, but just barely: one is an adjective acting like a noun, and the other is a verb acting like a noun (a gerund).

Additional Help With Nouns

A simple exercise in Naming Nouns will help answer any questions you might have about count and non-count nouns and help you distinguish between plural and singular forms.

The categories of count and non-count nouns can be confusing, however, and we suggest further review, especially for writers for whom English is a second language. The second section we offer is called Count and Non-Count, a basic review of those concepts and their uses in sentences, with many examples. Third, we offer WORKING WITH NOUNS, a more extensive (and somewhat more advanced) review of the count and non-count distinction, along with exercises. Finally, just when you thought you couldn't stand such riches, we suggest you review the uses of Articles, Determiners, and Quantifiers with count and non-count nouns.

*The section on testing for nouns is based primarily the analysis of noun forms in Analyzing English Grammar by Thomas Klammer, Muriel Schulz, and Angella Della Volpe. 3rd Edition. Allyn & Bacon: Needham Heights, Massachusetts. 2000. 60–63.

The simple definition is: a person, place or thing. Here are some examples:

• person: man, woman, teacher, John, Mary
• place: home, office, town, countryside, America
• thing: table, car, banana, money, music, love, dog, monkey

The problem with the simple definition above is that it does not explain why 'love' is a noun but can also be a verb.

Another (more complicated) way of recognizing a noun is by its:

1. ending
2. position
3. function

1. Noun ending

There are certain word endings that show that a word is a noun, for example:

• -ity → nationality
• -ment → appointment
• -ness → happiness
• -ation → relation
• -hood → childhood

But this is not true for the word endings of all nouns. For example, the noun 'spoonful' ends in -ful, but the adjective 'careful' also ends in -ful.

2. Position in sentence

We can often recognise a noun by its position in the sentence.

Nouns often come after a determiner (a determiner is a word like a, an, the, this, my, such):

• a relief
• an afternoon
• the doctor
• this word
• my house
• such stupidity

Nouns often come after one or more adjectives:

Collective Nouns

• a great relief
• a peaceful afternoon
• the tall, Indian doctor
• this difficult word
• my brown and white house
• such crass stupidity

3. Function in a sentence

Nouns have certain functions (jobs) in a sentence, for example:

Verbs

• subject of verb: Doctors work hard.
• object of verb: He likes coffee.
• subject and object of verb: Teachers teach students.

Adjectives

But the subject or object of a sentence is not always a noun. It could be a pronoun or a phrase. In the sentence 'My doctor works hard', the noun is 'doctor' but the subject is 'My doctor'.

What Are Nouns

Contributor: Josef Essberger