Noun

Sponsor with the world's largest charity for orphans

Nouns are a part of speech, classified into proper nouns (e.g. "Janet"), common nouns (e.g. "girl"), collective nouns (e.g. "bunch", "herd") and pronouns (e.g. "she" and "which"). Common wisdom has it that a noun is the name of a "person, place, or thing", though this is in practice inaccurate (for example nouns like "destruction" or "honesty" do not meet this description).

Further classifications include the distinction between concrete nouns and abstract nouns. Concrete nouns refer to definite object (e.g. chair, apple, Janet) and abstract nouns refer to ideas or concepts (e.g. justice, liberty). These two classifications can become confused with words such as "God".

In sentences, nouns occur in several different ways, the most common being as subjects (performers of action), or objects (recipients of action). In the sentence "John wrote me a letter", "John" is a subject; "me" and "letter" are objects.

Table of contents

1 Proper noun
2 Mass noun
3 Examples
4 Related articles

Proper noun

Proper nouns (also called proper names) are names and denote unique entities.

The meaning of a proper noun, outside of what it references, is frequently arbitrary or irrelevant (for example, someone might be named Tiger Smith despite being neither a tiger nor a smith). Because of this, they are often not translated between languages, although they may be transliterated--for example, the German surname "Knödel" becomes "Knoedel" in English, as opposed to "Dumpling".

Proper nouns are capitalized in English and most or all other languages that use the Latin alphabet; this is one easy way to recognize them. Note however that in German all types of nouns are capitalized. Also, in English, trademarks (e.g. "Dumpster" and "Kleenex") and words derived from proper nouns (e.g. "Aristotelian") are also capitalized; this phenomenon is probably a vestige of English's Germanic roots, and does not occur in Romance languages. The word "I", although capitalized in English and apparently referring to a unique object, is actually a pronoun.

Sometimes the same word can appear as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such entity is special; for example:

there can be many gods, but there is only one God.
there can be many internets (networks of TCP/IP networks), but the largest internet in the world is the Internet.

Some languages classify proper names as adjectives that modify a generic noun. Shades of this are found in the English language in phrases like "English language".

Mass noun

A mass noun is a type of common noun that represents a substance not easily quantified by a number. Mass nouns do not require limiting modifiers ("an", "two", "several", "many", etc.) and are not normally pluralized. Examples from English include "cheese", "laughter", and "precision".

Examples

Janet is the name of a girl.
Whistling off-key is annoying to me, but not to everybody.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
The World Wide Web has become the least expensive way to publish information.

Name.