Noun

A noun (from Latin nōmen 'name')[1] is a word that generally functions as the name of a
specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of
existence, or ideas.[2][note 1]

Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members
combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ between
languages. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive
adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase. "As far as we know, every language
makes a grammatical distinction that looks like a noun verb distinction."[3]

History

Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the
5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun (nāma) is one of the four main categories of
words defined.[4]

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog,
and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to
Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these
terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name".[5] The English word noun is derived from
the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman noun.

The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and
number. Because adjectives share these three grammatical categories, adjectives are placed
in the same class as nouns.
Similarly, the Latin nōmen includes both nouns (substantives) and adjectives, as originally did
the English word noun, the two types being distinguished as nouns substantive and nouns
adjective (or substantive nouns and adjective nouns, or short substantives and adjectives).
(The word nominal is now sometimes used to denote a class that includes both nouns and
adjectives.)

Many European languages use a cognate of the word substantive as the basic term for noun
(for example, Spanish sustantivo, "noun"). Nouns in the dictionaries of such languages are
demarked by the abbreviation s. or sb. instead of n., which may be used for proper nouns or
neuter nouns instead. In English, some modern authors use the word substantive to refer to a
class that includes both nouns (single words) and noun phrases (multiword units, also called
noun equivalents).[6] It can also be used as a counterpart to attributive when distinguishing
between a noun being used as the head (main word) of a noun phrase and a noun being used
as a noun adjunct. For example, the noun knee can be said to be used substantively in my
knee hurts, but attributively in the patient needed knee replacement.

Examples

The cat sat on the chair.

Please hand in your assignments by the end of the week.

Cleanliness is next to godliness.

Plato was an influential philosopher in ancient Greece.

Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit/The oldest sins the newest kind of ways? Henry IV
Part 2, act 4 scene 5.

A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives cannot.
In the following, an asterisk (*) in front of an example means that this example is
ungrammatical.

the name (name is a noun: can co-occur with a definite article the)

*the baptise (baptise is a verb: cannot co-occur with a definite article)

constant circulation (circulation is a noun: can co-occur with the attributive adjective
constant)

*constant circulate (circulate is a verb: cannot co-occur with the attributive adjective
constant)

a fright (fright is a noun: can co-occur with the indefinite article a)

 *an afraid (afraid is an adjective: cannot co-occur with the article a)

terrible fright (the noun fright can co-occur with the adjective terrible)

*terrible afraid (the adjective afraid cannot co-occur with the adjective terrible)

Definitions

Nouns have sometimes been defined in terms of the grammatical categories to which they
are subject (classed by gender, inflected for case and number). Such definitions tend to be
language-specific, since nouns do not have the same categories in all languages.

Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic
properties (their meanings). Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing,
event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. However this type of definition has been criticized by
contemporary linguists as being uninformative.[7]

There have been offered several examples of English-language nouns which do not have any
reference: drought, enjoyment, finesse, behalf (as found in on behalf of), dint (in dint of), and
sake (for the sake of).[8][9][10] Moreover, there may be a relationship similar to reference in the
case of other parts of speech: the verbs to rain or to mother; many adjectives, like red; and
there is little difference between the adverb gleefully and the noun-based phrase with
glee.[note 2]

There are placeholder names, such as the legal fiction reasonable person (whose existence is
not in question), an experimental artifact, or personifications such as gremlin.

Linguists often prefer to define nouns (and other lexical categories) in terms of their formal
properties. These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they
take, and also their syntax – how they combine with other words and expressions of
particular types. Such definitions may nonetheless still be language-specific since syntax as
well as morphology varies between languages. For example, in English, it might be noted that
nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles (as stated at the start of this article),
but this would not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.

There have been several attempts, sometimes controversial, to produce a stricter definition
of nouns on a semantic basis.

Gender

In some languages, genders are assigned to nouns, such as masculine, feminine and neuter.
The gender of a noun (as well as its number and case, where applicable) will often entail
agreement in words that modify or are related to it. For example, in French, the singular form
of the definite article is le for masculine nouns and la for feminine; adjectives and certain
verb forms also change (with the addition of -e for feminine). Grammatical gender often
correlates with the form of the noun and the inflection pattern it follows; for example, in both
Italian and Russian most nouns ending -a are feminine. Gender can also correlate with the
sex of the noun's referent, particularly in the case of nouns denoting people (and sometimes
animals). Nouns arguably do not have gender in Modern English, although many of them
denote people or animals of a specific sex (or social gender), and pronouns that refer to
nouns must take the appropriate gender for that noun. (The girl lost her spectacles.)

Classification

Proper and common nouns

A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing unique entities (such as India, Pegasus,
Jupiter, Confucius, or Pequod), as distinguished from common nouns, which describe a class
of entities (such as country, animal, planet, person or ship).[11]

Countable nouns and mass nouns

Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with
numerals or counting quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an
indefinite article such as a or an (in languages which have such articles). Examples of count
nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.

Mass nouns or uncountable (or non-count) nouns differ from count nouns in precisely that
respect: they cannot take plurals or combine with number words or the above type of
quantifiers. For example, it is not possible to refer to a furniture or three furnitures. This is true
even though the pieces of furniture comprising furniture could be counted. Thus the
distinction between mass and count nouns should not be made in terms of what sorts of
things the nouns refer to, but rather in terms of how the nouns present these entities.[12][13]

Many nouns have both countable and uncountable uses; for example, soda is countable in
"give me three sodas", but uncountable in "he likes soda".

Collective nouns
Collective nouns are nouns that – even when they are inflected for the singular – refer to
groups consisting of more than one individual or entity. Examples include committee,
government, and police. In English these nouns may be followed by a singular or a plural verb
and referred to by a singular or plural pronoun, the singular being generally preferred when
referring to the body as a unit and the plural often being preferred, especially in British
English, when emphasizing the individual members.[14] Examples of acceptable and
unacceptable use given by Gowers in Plain Words include:[14]

"A committee was appointed to consider this subject." (singular)

"The committee were unable to agree." (plural)
* "The committee were of one mind when I sat in on them." (unacceptable use of
plural)

Concrete nouns and abstract nouns

Concrete nouns refer to physical entities that can, in principle at least (i.e. different schools of
philosophy and sciences may question the assumption, but, for the most part, people agree to
the existence of something. E.g. a rock, a tree, universe), be observed by at least one of the
senses (for instance, chair, apple, Janet or atom). Abstract nouns, on the other hand, refer to
abstract objects; that is, ideas or concepts (such as justice or hatred). While this distinction is
sometimes exclusive, some nouns have multiple senses, including both concrete and
abstract ones: for example, the noun art, which usually refers to a concept (e.g., Art is an
important element of human culture.) but which can refer to a specific artwork in certain
contexts (e.g., I put my daughter's art up on the fridge.)

Some abstract nouns developed etymologically by figurative extension from literal roots.
These include drawback, fraction, holdout and uptake. Similarly, some nouns have both
abstract and concrete senses, with the latter having developed by figurative extension from
the former. These include view, filter, structure and key.

In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding a suffix (-ness, -ity, -ion) to adjectives or
verbs. Examples are happiness (from the adjective happy), circulation (from the verb circulate)
and serenity (from the adjective serene).

Alienable vs. inalienable nouns

Some languages, such as the Awa language spoken in Papua New Guinea,[15] refer to nouns
differently, depending on how ownership is being given for the given noun. This can be
broken into two categories: alienable possession and inalienable possession. An alienably
possessed noun is something that can exist independent of a possessor: for example 'tree'
can be possessed ('Lucy's tree') but need not be ('the tree'), and likewise for 'shirt' ('Mike's
shirt', 'that shirt') and 'roads' ('London's roads', 'those roads') . Inalienablly possessed nouns,
on the other hand, refer to something that does not exist independently of a possessor; this
includes kin terms such as 'father', body-part nouns such as 'shadow' or 'hair', and part-whole
nouns such as 'top' and 'bottom'.

Noun phrases

A noun phrase is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like words (nominal)
optionally accompanied by modifiers such as determiners and adjectives. A noun phrase
functions within a clause or sentence in a role such as that of subject, object, or complement
of a verb or preposition. For example, in the sentence "The black cat sat on a dear friend of
mine", the noun phrase the black cat serves as the subject, and the noun phrase a dear friend
of mine serves as the complement of the preposition on.

Pronouns

Nouns and noun phrases can typically be replaced by pronouns, such as he, it, which, and
those, in order to avoid repetition or explicit identification, or for other reasons. For example,
in the sentence Gareth thought that he was weird, the word he is a pronoun standing in place
of the person's name. The word one can replace parts of noun phrases, and it sometimes
stands in for a noun. An example is given below:

John's car is newer than the one that Bill has.

But one can also stand in for larger parts of a noun phrase. For example, in the following
example, one can stand in for new car.

This new car is cheaper than that one.

Nominalization

Nominalization is a process whereby a word that belongs to another part of speech comes to
be used as a noun. In French and Spanish, for example, adjectives frequently act as nouns
referring to people who have the characteristics denoted by the adjective. This sometimes
happens in English as well, as in the following examples:

This legislation will have the most impact on the poor.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the powerful.
The Socialist International is a worldwide association of political parties.
See also

Description

Grammatical case

Phi features

Punctuation

Reference

Notes

1. Example nouns for:

Living creatures (including people, alive, dead or imaginary): mushrooms, dogs, Afro-Caribbeans,
rosebushes, Nelson Mandela, bacteria, Klingons, etc.

Physical objects: hammers, pencils, Earth, guitars, atoms, stones, boots, shadows, etc.

Places: closets, temples, rivers, Antarctica, houses, Grand Canyon, utopia, etc.

Actions: swimming, exercises, diffusions, explosions, flight, electrification, embezzlement, etc.

Qualities: colors, lengths, deafness, weights, roundness, symmetry, warp speed, etc.

Mental or physical states of existence: jealousy, sleep, heat, joy, stomachache, confusion, mind
meld, etc.

2. Nouns occur in idioms with no meaning outside the idiom: rock and roll does not describe two
different things named by rock and by roll; someone who falls for something lock, stock and barrel
does not fall for something lock, for stock, and for barrel; a trick using smoke and mirrors does not
separate into the effect of smoke and each mirror. See hendiadys and hendiatris.

References

1. nōmen (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=nomen) .
Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary on Perseus Project.

2. "Noun" (https://www.theidioms.com/nouns/) . The Idioms Dictionary (online). The Idioms,

Incorporated. 2013.

3. David Adger (2019). Language Unlimited: The science behind our most creative power. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-19-882809-9.

4. Bimal Krishna Matilal, The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language, 1990
(Chapter 3)