What Is a Noun?

A noun is a word that gives a name to either an object, person or place (such as a ‘table,’ ‘queen’ or ‘London’) or an idea or concept (such as ‘love’).

What is the difference between a common noun and a proper noun?

In the examples above, one of the nouns, ‘London,’ is given a capital letter because it is a proper noun.

This is different from a common noun. A common noun does not identify a specific person or place but refers to objects or concepts in a general way. A noun that identifies a specific individual, person or place, however, is a proper noun. For example, ‘Jenny,’ ‘Peter,’ and ‘Paris’ are all proper nouns. These start with a capital letter in English.

What is number?

As the above examples show, common nouns can be either concrete (‘table’) or abstract (‘love’). Concrete nouns exist in the physical world. Being concrete, they will be easily countable and therefore have a grammatical dimension known as ‘number.’

There is either one or more of the noun in question, in which case it is either singular (‘the dog’) or plural (‘the dogs’). The morpheme ‘-s’ is the commonly used inflection to show the plural in English.

What is case?

When creating a sentence, we wish to talk about a topic (the subject) and express an outcome or explain what happens to the subject (the predicate).

The subject in our sentence will be a noun – we name the ‘thing’ that we want to talk about.

There may be other nouns involved in the action too. A noun which is impacted by the action is the direct object. If the noun is merely the recipient of the action, it is an indirect object. Indirect objects do not impact whether the action can take place or not, they are merely involved in some way.

Let’s take an example.

In this case, we’ll construct the sentence for “The dog eats the fish in the kitchen,” with the subject, direct object and indirect object highlighted:

The classification of the function of these nouns in the sentence is referred to as case. The subject noun is in the subjective, or nominative case; the objects are in the objective case. The direct object noun is in the accusative case, while the indirect object noun would be referred to as being in the dative case.

What is grammatical gender?

A noun can be masculine (such as ‘king’), feminine (such as ‘queen’), or something neutral (such as ‘table’).

In English, we follow natural gender, which means that once we introduce a noun, we then use the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ for those words with obvious gender (or where the natural gender is known), but most words are neuter and referred to as ‘it.’

This is different from grammatical gender, whereby every noun can be either masculine or feminine (in languages such as French and Spanish); or masculine, feminine or neuter (as in German). In the case of grammatical gender, the words for ‘it’ will match the grammatical gender rather than the natural gender of the word.

This can come across as illogical. As Mark Twain once illustrated when he provided a literal English translation of a German text, it will be strange to English ears that a wife, who is female, is referred to as ‘it’ in German. Meanwhile, an inanimate object, such as a fish scale is feminine:

“It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot get her out.”

Why are number, case and gender important?

These grammatical categories impact other words that we might also use in a sentence, such as articles (the words for ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘some’) and pronouns. In some languages, the noun itself is adapted (or inflected) according to these categories.

It is important therefore to appreciate how nouns are categorized within sentences in order to understand how other parts of speech and grammatical functions are working.

What types of nouns are there?

There are eight types of noun:

Countable noun A noun that can have a quantity applied.  For instance ‘one dog,’ ‘two dogs,’ etc.	Uncountable noun A noun that is impossible to count.  For example, ‘water,’ or ‘air.’
Common noun A noun that does not identify a specific individual, person or place. For example, ‘city’ is a common noun, while ‘London’ is a proper noun.	Proper Noun A noun that identifies a specific individual, person or place. For example, ‘Jenny,’ ‘Peter,’ and ‘Paris’ are all proper nouns. These start with a capital letter in English.
Concrete noun Concrete nouns exist in the physical world. For example, ‘dog,’ ‘table’ or ‘air’ are all concrete nouns.	Abstract noun Abstract nouns do not exist in a physical sense. Abstract nouns are often concepts or emotions, such as ‘independence’ or ‘love.’
Compound noun These are nouns that have been created from two individual words, such as ‘dining room,’ ‘check-in,’ ‘wishing well’ or ‘ice cream.’	Collective noun A noun that describes a collection of individual people, animals or objects. For instance, ‘the police’ is a collective noun, made up of many individuals. ‘Family’ is another example.