English
What is a noun?
Quick answer
A noun is a word that names a person, place, thing or idea, such as teacher, Lagos, pencil or happiness.
In one sentence
A noun is a naming word: it names a person, a place, a thing or an idea.
Explained
Look around you and name what you see: window, chair, sister, sky. Every one of those is a noun. Nouns are often the first words babies learn, because they label the world.
Nouns come in a few types:
- Common nouns name any one of a kind: girl, city, dog, river.
- Proper nouns name one particular person, place or thing and start with a capital letter: Amara, Nairobi, Monday. See proper nouns.
- Concrete nouns are things you can see, hear, touch, taste or smell: bread, music, sand.
- Abstract nouns are ideas, feelings and qualities: joy, courage, friendship, time.
- Collective nouns name a group: a team of players, a flock of birds, a class of children.
Two quick tests help when you are not sure. Can you put the or a in front of it? (the bridge works, the quickly does not.) Can you make it plural? (one bridge, two bridges.) If yes, it is probably a noun. Not every noun passes both tests (you would not say two happinesses), but most do.
A noun can grow into a noun phrase when other words gather round it: the bus → the big red bus → the big red bus with a flat tyre. Building noun phrases with adjectives is one of the quickest ways to make writing more vivid.
dog
ball
house
tree
book
Examples
- The farmer fed the goats in the morning.
- My grandmother lives in Accra.
- Kindness costs nothing.
- A swarm of bees buzzed past the window.
| Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| common | book, city, teacher |
| proper | Priya, Toronto, July |
| abstract | hope, fear, peace |
| collective | herd, choir, crowd |
Common mistakes
- Thinking nouns must be objects. Ideas such as honesty and weekend are nouns too.
- Calling every word after "the" a noun. In the red bus, red is an adjective; bus is the noun.
- Missing that one word can change job. Walk is a verb in "We walk" but a noun in "We went for a walk."
Quick quiz
Nouns
Check what you know with 4 quick questions.
Question 1 of 4
Which word is a noun?
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For grown-ups
Related topics
Proper nouns
A proper noun is the name of one particular person, place, day, month or thing, like Zainab, Paris or Tuesday. Proper nouns always begin with a capital letter.
Determiners
A determiner is a word that comes before a noun to show which one or how many, such as a, an, the, this, those, my, some, every or three.
Adjectives
An adjective is a word that describes a noun, telling you what kind, which one or how many, like a huge elephant, a sour lemon or three red balloons.
Plurals
A plural means more than one. Most nouns add -s (cats) or -es (boxes), but some change in other ways, like babies, leaves, mice and children.
Verbs
A verb is a word for an action (run, eat, write) or a state of being (is, seem, know). Almost every sentence has one, and verbs change to show tense.
Apostrophes
An apostrophe has two jobs. It shows where letters are missing in a contraction (can't, it's) and shows that something belongs to someone (the dog's bone, the girls' team).