Noun

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Nouns

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.

Case, number, and gender

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 noun—such as "he" (subject) and "him" (object)—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.

Classification of nouns

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 Aristotelēs 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 objects—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".

Nouns and pronouns

Noun phrases can be replaced by pronouns, such as "he", "me", "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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