A noun is a word that names a person, place, thing, event, or idea. There are different types of nouns, including proper, concrete, abstract, countable, uncountable, and collective. Nouns can be the subject or object of a sentence and can be singular or plural. In some languages, nouns have gender and cases, but in English, they only have a possessive case. Nouns are essential for constructing sentences.
As a simple definition, a noun is any word that names a person, place, or thing. This definition is somewhat vague, and many people also include that names can mean an event or an idea. A noun is one of the main parts of speech, along with verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and articles.
There are many different types of names. These include proper nouns, which refer to a specific person, place, or thing and are indicated in English by a capital first letter, such as Nancy or Los Angeles; concrete nouns, which are nouns that describe a tangible object or person, such as dog; abstract nouns, which describe anything that cannot be perceived using the five senses, such as love; countable nouns, which are nouns that can be pluralized, such as chairs; uncountable nouns, which are nouns that have no plural, such as bedding; and collective nouns, which describe a group of another noun, such as a murder of crows.
A noun usually takes on one of two roles in a sentence, that of the subject or that of the object of the sentence. The subject of the sentence can be seen as the “doer” of the sentence, the noun that acts in some way. The object of the sentence, which is an optional component, is a noun on which the subject acts. An example might help demonstrate these roles. In the sentence:
The man went on a bicycle.
the words man and bicycle are both nouns, with man acting as the subject and bicycle acting as the object.
People learning parts of speech for the first time often find it difficult to distinguish between nouns and adjectives such as yellow or external. The trick to distinguishing the difference is to identify the role the word is playing in the sentence, especially since in English the same word can often be used as a different part of speech depending on the context.
For example, in the sentence:
The yellow man rode a bicycle. the word yellow is modifying the noun man, and therefore is used as an adjective. In this context, yellow does not name a person, place or thing, but describes the state of man.
On the other hand, in the sentence:
The man liked yellow.
both the words man and yellow are used as nouns, with man the subject and yellow the object. In this context, the word yellow describes one thing, namely the color yellow.
In English, the names are pretty straightforward. They tend to come in only two forms, singular and plural. A regular noun can be made plural by simply adding an s or es at the end, as in the hat/hat combination, while irregular nouns follow different rules that must be learned individually for each noun, such as the combination goose/geese.
In many languages, in addition to being plural or singular, a noun can also have a specific gender or class associated with it, which affects how it might be inflected or interact with other parts of speech. In English we keep the idea of gender, but only use it in rare cases, such as steward/stewardess or waiter/waitress, although it is becoming more and more common to use gender-neutral forms of these words as well.
A noun can also have different cases, which help inform the role the noun plays in a sentence. In Latin, for example, the case of a noun changes depending on whether it is the subject or the object of the sentence. In English we rely more on word placement and supporting words such as prepositions to help convey this information. English nouns, however, still make use of a possessive or genitive case, which is indicated by adding ‘s to the end of a noun. Nouns form the basic building blocks of sentences, and in most cases, for a sentence to be grammatical, it must include at least one subject and one verb.
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