The Noun

We all learn about nouns pretty early on in education. We are asked, "What is a noun?" and we are taught that the answer is: a person, place or thing. But, nouns are so much more. Nouns also include the concept of ideas.

You heard that right!

Nouns are more than person, place and thing but also IDEAS. Crazy, right?

Ok, let's move forward. Those are the basics of the definition of nouns, but nouns need a little more identification. We can use its inflectional markings. These are typically suffixes that attach to words to indicate number and possession.

Singular nouns have no special inflectional markings. We already know when we talk about, a child, a guitar, a fan, or a dog, that this all indicates there is only one of the object being mentioned. Plural nouns are a different story. Here, a suffix of -s or -es will be added to the noun to indicate that there is more than one, such as, books, towels, maps, houses.

The trouble really comes when there are exceptions to these rules. Many words do not change easily from their singular form to plural. Some words have a change in vowel sound, such as man to men and goose to geese. There are other irregular plural nouns that must be memorized because they do not follow any specific pattern. An example of this would be the noun ox. The assumption would be have the plural as oxes but it is actually oxen. This can be confusing for one first learning of plural nouns.

Nouns can also be identified by their ability to "have" something. By adding a -'s to the end of a noun it shows its ability to be possessive. There is no irregular possessive nouns. Even is the plural of the word irregular, the possessive is not. So we end up with "the dog's bone" or "the girl's backpack." A noun can take possession of something else.

Nouns can further be divided in to categories. There are common nouns and proper nouns. Common nouns are your normal everyday nouns that have no need of special treatment. Proper nouns, however, need that special treatment that the common nouns lack. You gotta CAPITALIZE your proper nouns. Well, you need to capitalize in the sense that the first letter in your proper noun needs to be capitalized, not actually the entire word. That could be awkward. Your proper nouns that need capitalization are specific nouns, typically names of people or places. Jessica, for example, is an excellent proper noun.

Concrete nouns and abstract nouns differentiate between nouns that can be visualized, such as, sheet, television, clock, verses nouns that cannot, for example, sincerity.

Animate and inanimate nouns differentiate between people and animals and things that are not alive.

Animate nouns can be further categorized into human and nonhuman nouns.

Nouns are essential to understand within the English language because they are the subject, or the "what" is being references or discussed in the sentence structure.