Noun

In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.^[1]^{[note 1]}

For other uses, see Noun (disambiguation).

In linguistics, nouns constitute a lexical category (part of speech) defined according to how its members combine with members of other lexical categories. The syntactic occurrence of nouns differs among languages.

In English, prototypical nouns are common nouns or proper nouns that can occur with determiners, articles and attributive adjectives, and can function as the head of a noun phrase. According to traditional and popular classification, pronouns are distinct from nouns, but in much modern theory they are considered a subclass of nouns.^[2] Every language has various linguistic and grammatical distinctions between nouns and verbs.^[3]

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.

Characterization and definition[edit]

Nouns have sometimes been characterized in terms of the grammatical categories by which they may be varied (for example gender, case, and number). Such definitions tend to be language-specific, since different languages may apply different categories.

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., but this manner of definition has been criticized as uninformative.^[7]

Several English nouns lack an intrinsic referent of their own: behalf (as in on behalf of), dint (by dint of), and sake (for the sake of).^[8] Moreover, other parts of speech may have reference-like properties: the verbs to rain or to mother, or adjectives like red; and there is little difference between the adverb gleefully and the prepositional phrase with glee.^{[note 2]}

A functional approach defines a noun as a word that can be the head of a nominal phrase, i.e., a phrase with referential function, without needing to go through morphological transformation.^[9]^[10]

Description

Grammatical case

Phi features

Punctuation

Reference

Lester, Mark; Beason, Larry (2005). The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage. McGraw-Hill. 0-07-144133-6.

ISBN

Borer, Hagit (2005). In Name Only. Structuring Sense. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gowers, Ernest (2014). Gowers, Rebecca (ed.). . Particular. ISBN 978-0-141-97553-5.

Plain Words

Laycock, Henry (2005). "", Draft version of entry in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Oxford: Elsevier.

Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns

For definitions of nouns based on the concept of "identity criteria":

For more on identity criteria:

For the concept that nouns are "prototypically referential":

For an attempt to relate the concepts of identity criteria and prototypical referentiality:

– Nouns described by The Idioms Dictionary.