A noun is a word that names something: a person, an animal, a place, a thing, an action, a quality, or an idea. This article shows how to tell nouns from other words, explains the difference between count and non-count nouns, and ends with four simple tests that identify a noun.
Nouns are one of the biggest and most obvious of the English word classes, the parts of speech. Knowing what makes them, and how to tell them apart from the others, helps you understand how English sentences work.
What are nouns?
Nouns are also called "naming words", because they give something its name. That can be the name of a person or an animal, a place or a thing, an idea or an action, or even a concept or a quality. Here are some examples:
- Living beings: Beatrix, king, officer, cat, rodent, bacteria, tree, mushroom, daisy
- Objects and items: screw, planet, chair, pants, trumpet, window
- Places: Los Angeles, garden, drawer, Europe, lake, restaurant
- Actions: running, explosion, flight, handling, shout
- Qualities: size, color, height, build
- States: joy, confusion, anger, sadness
- Abstract ideas: love, dream, theory, regulation, sponsorship, perfection, physics
Names like Beatrix, Los Angeles, and Europe are proper nouns: they name one particular person or place, and they start with a capital letter. The others are common nouns.
Nouns can have different functions in a sentence. Besides being the subject, a noun can be a direct object, an indirect object, or the object of a preposition.
In linguistics, nouns belong to the open word classes. This means that the class can grow, and new nouns are added all the time. The opposite is a closed class, such as pronouns or prepositions, which has a fixed set of words that new ones hardly ever join.
Count nouns and non-count nouns
English distinguishes between count nouns (also called countable nouns) and mass nouns (also called non-count or uncountable nouns).
Count nouns can be combined with numbers, with the indefinite articles a and an, and with quantifiers like each and several. They have a plural form, which usually, but not always, differs from the singular. For example:
Beatrix owns two cats. Several cats can be seen roaming in her garden, though.
Non-count nouns have no plural form, because what they describe cannot be counted. They cannot be used with a number, with a or an, or with quantifiers like each and several; they take words like much, little, and some instead. The things that make up the whole may be countable, but the whole is not: one table, two tables, but furniture. Compare these examples:
- Correct: Pick up the garbage.
- Wrong: Marilyn found three garbage in the backyard after the festival, and several garbage on the meadow behind the house.
Many nouns belong to both classes, depending on the context. They can describe a substance that cannot be counted, or single items that can:
- Countable: Ben bought five beers at the store.
- Non-count: He likes beer.
Nouns and gender
In many languages, nouns show case, number, and gender. In English, most nouns show number only: the singular and the plural have different forms (cat and cats, ox and oxen). English nouns have no grammatical gender. In languages like French, German, and Russian, every noun has a grammatical gender, and the words around it, such as articles and adjectives, change to match it. In English, only a few nouns show whether a person or an animal is male or female, such as actor and actress or lion and lioness.
What is nominalization?
Nominalization is the process of turning a word from another class, such as an adjective or a verb, into a noun. Consider this example:
This battle will cost us many men if we do not consider the weak and the ill.
Here, the adjectives weak and ill are used as nouns: the weak means "weak people". Verbs can be turned into nouns, too, often with a suffix: decide becomes decision, and move becomes movement.
4 tests to identify a noun
A few tests help you to identify a noun. They fall into two groups: formal tests look at the form of a word, and function tests look at what it does in a sentence.
Formal tests
- Suffix test: Does the word end in a suffix that forms nouns?
- Plural test: Can you add a plural ending to the word?
- Possessive test: Can you add a possessive ending to the word?
These three tests check which endings (morphemes) a word has or can take.
The suffix test: some suffixes, such as -tion, -ness, -hood, and -ment, form nouns, so a word that ends in one of them is a noun. These suffixes do not attach to just any word, though:
- Nouns: affection, sadness, brotherhood, agreement
- Not words: beautifultion, quickhood
The plural test tries to form the plural with the common English plural ending -s or -es. If that works, the word is a noun, because only nouns form a plural with this ending. Be careful, though: verbs take an -s too (she runs), so use this test together with the others.
- Plurals: cats, buses, bottles
- Not plurals: happys, quicklys, untils
The possessive test checks whether you can add the possessive ending 's to the word:
- Correct: Andrew's, today's, the dog's
- Wrong: strong's, quickly's, under's
Function test
The fourth test, the article test, checks what a word does in a sentence: can it follow a, an, or the directly, without another word in between?
- Correct: the cat, a table, an idea
- Wrong: a neat, the quickly, an under
Nominalized adjectives such as the weak pass this test, because in that phrase they are used as nouns. To learn more about the little words that come before nouns, see all about articles in English grammar.