Review this lesson as many times as you want, and when you are ready, take the pop quiz on this chapter.

Nouns

A noun is the name of a person, a place, a thing or an idea. Sometimes a noun is the name of an action.

person	man, woman, child
place	ocean, desert, wood, farm
thing	cabbage, hammer,
idea	hope, plan, memory
action	intention, thinking, running

Common and Proper Nouns

Common nouns describe groups or members of groups; whereas, proper nouns identify a unique example. Proper names are usually capitalised.

Common Noun	Proper Noun
man	Tom
aircraft	Tiger Moth
religion	Christianity
entertainers	The Beatles
nation	England

In English, the days of the week and the months are capitalised:

January, February... November, December

but the seasons are not:

winter, spring, summer, autumn

(Although the seasons are capitalised in USA).
Directions are not capitalised:

north, west, south, east

Identifying Nouns

Proper nouns are easy to identify because they are the names of particular people or things. For instance, Rob, Betty, Lorraine.

Common nouns have the following properties:

• They can be preceded by some determiners.
• They sometimes have plurals.
• They can have a possessive case.

 

Determiners

Common nouns can be preceded by determiners: a, the, some, a few, my,...

If a word is a common noun, then the following sentence makes sense when the word is inserted:

My [ insert noun ] (is/are here).

For instance, house is a noun, so:

My house is here,

makes sense.

The word happy, however, isn't a noun, so:

My happy is here,

does not make sense.

Note on Using the Tests

Most tests show whether a word could be a noun - sometimes. They do not indicate the word is a noun in the given sentence. To do this, we need to apply the test in that sentence. Consider this sentence:

The delicate and time-consuming work is important.

Using our test [My [ insert noun ] (is/are here).]:

My work is here.

makes sense. So the word work can sometimes be a noun. (Sometimes it is a verb, of course).

To determine whether a word is a noun, we need to apply the test in the sentence. In the sentence:

The delicate and time-consuming work is important.

We note that 'work' is preceded by the determiner 'The', so it is a noun.

In this sentence:

They work till they drop.

We cannot precede the word work with my:

My work till they drop.

Therefore work isn't a noun in this sentence. (It is, of course, a verb, in that sentence).

Examples of Nouns and Non-Nouns

Here are some examples of applying the test on nouns and non-nouns:

Nouns	Non-Nouns
My cat is here	My entertaining is here
My bread is here	My starchy is here
My principal is here	My quickly is here
My dollars are here	My full is here
My envelope is here	My exceptional is here

 

Plurals

Nouns often have plurals; whereas other parts of speech do not. So if a word has a plural, it is a noun. Uncountable Nouns, however, do not have plurals.

Singular	Plural
cat	cats
man	men
fish	fishes
formula	formulae
MP (Member of Parliament)	MPs

Nowadays, in Standard English, acronyms do not have periods. So M.P. becomes MP. Plurals are made by adding an s – MPs. If periods are retained, then apostrophe s is used – M.P.'s. The 's plural is sometimes used when confusion might result – Dot the i's and crosss the t's, 1's and 2's (because 1s might look like Is, and 2's for consistency).

Possession

We can check whether a word is a noun, by asking whether it has a possessive form. For instance:

Noun	Possessive Form
dog	the dog's dinner.
Charles	Charles' dinner.
yesterday	yesterday's error.

We indicate possession by adding the apostrophe (') s. If Mary is the owner of the book we write – Mary's book. When the word for the owner ends in s anyway, we would normally add only an apostrophe at the end of the word. So we write and say the boys' school. However, especially with proper names, we add the apostrophe s when sound requires it – Charles's book, Odysseus's Quest. But... if this would mean we end up saying a sound like "iz-iz", we do not add the final s. So if the owner of the book is Mr Bridges, we write and say Mr Bridges' book (without an s after the apostrophe).

Notes: In older English, Charles' book and Odysseus' Quest would have been correct, although almost everyone would have said Charles's book, although some might have tried to say Odysseus' Quest (because it sounds more literary).
The apostrophe is not used with pronouns – its, yours, ours.
The apostrophe is sometimes called a mark of elision to indicate some letters have been omitted – it's going (it is going), it'll go fine (it will go fine).

Abstract and Concrete Nouns