Noun
A
noun, or
noun substantive, is a
part of speech (a
word or
phrase) which can co-occur with
(in)definite articles and
attributive adjectives, and function as the
head of a
noun phrase.
The word "noun" derives from the
Latin nomen meaning "
name", and a traditional definition of nouns is that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a
person,
place,
thing,
event,
substance,
quality or
idea. They serve as the subject or object of a verb, and the object of a preposition. That definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. For example, it appears that verbs like
kill or
die refer to events, and so they fall under the definition. Similarly, adjectives like
yellow or
difficult might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like
outside or
upstairs seem to refer to places. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, so the definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns from other parts of speech.
Word classes like nouns were first described by ancient Greek and Sanskrit grammarians like
Dionysios Thrax and
, and defined in terms of their
morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns can be inflected for
grammatical case, such as dative or accusative, while verbs cannot be so inflected. Verbs, on the other hand, can be inflected for
tenses, such as past, present or future, while nouns cannot.
Aristotle also had a notion of
onomata (nouns) and
rhemata (verbs) which, however, does not exactly correspond our notions of verbs and nouns.
In prases, noun phrases may function in a variety of different ways, the most obvious being as
subjects or
objects. For example, in the sentence "++++ wrote me a letter", "++++" is the subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects (of which "letter" is a noun and "me" a pronoun). These different roles are known as
noun cases. Variant forms of the same nounâ€"such as "he" (subject) and "him" (object)â€"are called
declensions.
The
number of a noun indicates how many objects the noun refers to. In the simplest case, number distinguishes between singular ("man") and plural ("men"). Some languages, such as
Aleut,
Anglo-Saxon,
Arabic and
Saami, also distinguish
dual from plural.
Many languages (though not English) have a concept of noun
gender, also known as
noun class, whereby every noun is designated as, for example, masculine or feminine.
Proper nouns and common nouns
Proper nouns (also called
proper names) are the names of unique entities. For example, "Janet", "Jupiter" and "Germany" are proper nouns. Proper nouns are
capitalized in
English and most other languages that use the
Latin alphabet, and this is one easy way to recognise them. This fails, however, in
German, in which nouns of all types are capitalized.
All other nouns are called
common nouns. For example, "girl", "planet", and "country" are common nouns.
Sometimes the same word can function as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such entity is special. For example: "There can be many
gods, but there is only one
God."
The common meaning of the word or words constituting a proper noun may be unrelated to the object to which the proper noun refers. For example, someone might be named "Tiger Smith" despite being neither a
tiger nor a
smith. For this reason, proper nouns are usually not
translated between languages, although they may be
transliterated. For example, the German surname
Knödel becomes
Knodel or
Knoedel in English (not the literal
Dumpling). However, the translation of placenames and the names of
monarchs,
popes, and non-contemporary
authors is common and sometimes universal. For instance, the
Portuguese word
Lisboa becomes
Lisbon in
English; the English
London becomes
Londres in French; and the
Greek AristotelÄ"s becomes
Aristotle in English.
Count nouns and mass nouns
In everyday terms,
count nouns (or
countable nouns) refer to discrete, countable objects. Count nouns can take a plural, can combine with
numerals or
quantifiers (e.g. "one", "two", "several", "every", "most"), and can take an indefinite article ("a" or "an"). Examples of count nouns are "chair", "nose", and "occasion".
Mass nouns (or
non-countable nouns) refer to objects that cannot be individually enumerated. Examples from English include "laughter", "cutlery", "helium", and "furniture". For example, it is not possible to refer to "a furniture" or "three furnitures".
Some words function in the singular as a count noun and, without a change in the spelling, as a mass noun in the plural: she caught a
fish, we caught
fish; he shot a
deer, they shot some
deer; the
craft was dilapidated, the pier was chockablock with
craft.
Collective nouns
Collective nouns are subject-specific words used to define a grouping of people, animals, objects or concepts. For example, in the phrase "
a parliament of owls",
parliament is a collective noun.
Concrete nouns and abstract nouns
Concrete nouns refer to definite objectsâ€"objects in which you use at least one of your
senses. For instance, "chair", "apple", or "Janet".
Abstract nouns on the other hand refer to ideas or concepts, such as "justice" or "hate". While this distinction is sometimes useful, the boundary between the two of them is not always clear. In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding noun-forming suffixes ("-ness", "-ity", "-tion") to adjectives or verbs. Examples are "happiness", "circulation" and "serenity".
Noun phrases can be replaced by
pronouns, such as "he", "it", "which", and "those", in order to avoid repetition or explicit identification, or for other reasons. For example, in the sentence "Janet thought that he was weird", the word "he" is a pronoun standing in place of the name of the person in question.
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Verbs
