::Noun

Nouns::example    English::article    Grammar::nouns    Phrase::language    Co-occur::which    Speech::object

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Examples

The cat sat on the mat. 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 can't. 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.)

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A noun (from Latin nōmen, literally meaning "name")<ref></ref> is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref group=note>Example nouns for:

• Living creatures (including people, alive or dead): mushrooms, dog, Afro-Caribbeans, rosebush, Nelson Mandela, bacteria, etc.
• Physical objects: hammer, pencils, Earth, guitar, atom, stones, boots, etc.
• Places: closet, temple, river, Antarctica, houses, Grand Canyon, etc.
• Actions: swimming, eating, diffusion, explosions, flight, electrification, etc.
• Qualities: color, length, deafness, weight, roundness, symmetry, etc.
• Mental or physical states of existence: jealousy, sleep, heat, joy, stomachache, confusion, etc.
• Ideas or abstract entities: musicianship, cooperativeness, perfection, The New York Times, mathematics, The Beatles, etc.</ref> Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.<ref>Loos, Eugene E., et al. 2003. Glossary of linguistic terms: What is a noun?</ref>

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 from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

Noun sections
Intro   Definitions of nouns    Gender    Classification of nouns    Noun phrases    Pronouns    Nominalization    See also    Notes    References    Further reading    External links   

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