Test your knowledge

Identify the four nouns in the following sentence. Type them in the text box below: 

Charlie is a great dog who loves playing with toys and fetching balls. 

A:

Charlie is a great dog who loves playing with toys and fetching balls. 

The standard definition of a noun, our first major part of speech, is quite simple and most English speakers have learned it at some point – a noun is a person, place, or thing. This definition works quite well for the words in our little pretest: Charlie, dog, toys, and balls are all clearly things. So – it’s a start! What about the following sentence: 

Boredom is a factor to consider on a long sea voyage. 

Insert Text Box

Accordion opens to: 

Boredom is a factor to consider on a long sea voyage. 

What are the nouns? Boredom, factor, sea, and voyage! They are clearly not persons, nor are they places. Are they “things”? Well, no – at least not in any physical sense. But yet – they are nouns in a deeper sense – they are the things that the sentence is about! So we shall add to our previous definition of a noun “idea or concept” which seems to cover most of what we need from nouns, including concepts like freedom, democracy, truth, honesty, and justice (all nouns). Not only that, but the one noun that IS a “thing”, sea, is only used to describe what kind of voyage we are talking about. Let’s dig a little further though: 

To choose colors for our kitchen remodel, my wife picked out several samples, including three whites, a light pink and a green. 

Volcanic activity is commonly characterized by the formation of extrusive igneous rocks. 

It is pretty simple to identify some of the nouns in the ….

So in fact, there are many cases, especially in academic texts, where nouns are used to name actions, processes, and events, and even properties of other things, like colors, can be nouns. So, “thing” seems to cover a lot of ground in our working definition of noun! The sentences above are examples of nominalizations, a common feature of academic writing – this topic is covered here in our site. 

What is very consistent about all nouns though, is that they all have grammatical properties that distinguish them from other parts of speech: 

• They can be the “subjects” and “objects” of sentences
• They may have plural forms (formed by adding -s or -es) indicating that they are more than one in number. 
• They can be preceded by certain types of function words called determiners (a/an, the, these, those, etc.) that tell us extra information about the noun that follows them – we will cover this word class shortly. 
• They can be replaced in a sentence by a pronoun (I, you, we, mine, yours ours, etc), another class of function words that works to shorten and simplify language.

It is these grammatical properties that really determine what “kind” of word a word is in a sentence, and helps us understand the following big idea: 

A word’s class as a noun, adjective, verb, or adverb mostly depends on how it is used in a particular instance.

Proper Nouns and capitalization

                Some special nouns require attention because they are very important in writing and require extra rules and that is the special class of nouns called proper nouns. Proper nouns are nouns that identify just a specific and unique person or thing in the world: Julius Caesar, The Great Pyramid of Cheops, The Hudson River, and so on. People’s names are always proper nouns. Ideas, concepts, inventions, school subjects, important concepts and ideas, and so on are NOT proper nouns in English although they may be in other Germanic languages. Further, general terms like “river” or “mountain” are not proper nouns by themselves,  So, to clarify, the following words are NOT proper nouns and do not receive any special attention with respect to capitalizations – history, linguistics, noun, rivers, 

Nouns as adjectives?