1.1.1 Nouns
In this lesson, we will explore what a noun is, the types of nouns there are and some examples of each. There are many types of nouns, as will be shown later and it is good to learn the many variations (of every word class, not only nouns) as it could help you achieve higher grades in your GCSEs!
Noun
A noun is a word used to identify people, names, places, or things (e.g. Dwayne Johnson, Paris, table). There are numerous types of nouns, such as: proper nouns, concrete nouns, abstract nouns, collective nouns, plural nouns, and many more. Some nouns can even belong to more than one type at the same time.
Proper Noun
A proper noun is a noun that refers to a specific person, place or thing that needs their name capitalised. For example, someone’s name like Adam, or a place like Palestine. Also, religiously, if you were referring to the Abrahamic God, you would capitalise the G in God (whereas when you refer to Greek or Roman mythology, you would usually reference the deity with the lowercase g as in gods). We also capitalise companies, businesses, films or nations, such as: Knowness, Ikea, Star Wars or Brazil.
Places that always need a capital letter like a country, or really important people like the King, President etc. would also be classed as proper nouns.
Proper nouns always have the starting letter capitalised, they can be anywhere in a sentence. Do not get this confused with a noun that happens to be at the start of the sentence and therefore happens to have a capitalised starting letter.
Concrete Noun
A concrete noun is a thing you can touch, taste, hear, smell or see (the five senses). For example, things you can physically sense, such as: a watch, food, an alarm, odours or trees. This is not to be confused with emotions, where people say they ‘feel’ sad or ‘feel’ angry — you cannot literally feel these things. We have just given the ‘feeling’ a name, like anger or sadness.
Concrete nouns include things like air, oxygen, bacteria, or anything that is real and can be physically sensed. These are real things. This is in comparison to abstract nouns, which we will get into next lesson after this small test.
Abstract Noun
An abstract noun is a thing that you cannot sense with the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell). These are usually emotions and ideas, such as love or capitalism. A common misconception is that you can literally ‘feel’ love, or ‘feel’ pain. However, these are just words attributed to the chemical reaction going on in your body. It is not a literal or physical ‘thing’. If you are confused whether something is an abstract or concrete noun, do the five senses test and think: “Is it possible to taste, smell, touch, feel or see this?” If not, then you know, it is an abstract noun, and not a concrete noun.
Collective Noun
A collective noun is a singular word that refers to a group of things. Such as the word mankind, or people. They both refer to more than one human. A litter of cats refers to more than one cat. A murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a crash of rhinos and a pride of lions — all these collective nouns are nouns that refer to a grouping of things. This also works with the words team, class or community. Any word that refers to a group of things, real or imagined, counts as a collective noun. Witches are fictional characters, but they have a collective noun, called a coven.
Do not get this confused with plural forms, such as ‘witches’ — this is just the plural form of the singular noun witch, or, ‘friends’ — this is just the plural form of the singular noun friend. Anything that has been made plural with a suffix (adding of an extra letter at the end — usually an s) is a countable noun.
Countable Noun
A countable noun is as intuitive as it sounds — it is a noun that you can count, such as players, phones, cats, cars, and anything that can be made plural. If something can be pluralised, it means you can refer to more than one of the things mentioned. For example, bottle is a singular noun. To make it plural, you can change bottle to bottles. You add an s to signify that there is more than one.
In most cases, you just add an s to make a noun plural. However, there are cases where you might have to add es, ss, or even an x. Then, there’s the interesting case of a noun already ending in an s! What do you do? Let me show you some examples.
Uncountable Noun
An uncountable noun is the antithesis (opposite) of a countable noun. It is simply something you cannot count as singular things in their base form. For example, water, sugar, salt and air. These words can’t be made plural, as they are already somewhat collective, or more than one.
People ask colloquially (informally): “How many sugars are you having in your tea?” — but this isn’t truly grammatically correct. The grammatically correct way of saying this would be: “How many spoons of sugar are you having in your tea?”. Waters, sugars, salts and airs does not make sense as a singular noun. So these nouns would be considered uncountable nouns. This also goes for previous notions of abstract nouns, such as love, advice, anger and governance.
Gerunds
A gerund is a verb that is made into a noun by adding -ing on the end or reordering a sentence to make an action an activity. For example: “Boxing is my favourite sport” or “I like reading and playing”. You will notice that these words are verbs if you put them in sentences like “Look at me, I am playing!” or “I am reading this book”. But they are made into nouns when the sentence is talking about the action as an activity or thing.
Reading is an activity, as well as an action, but if the sentence is written in a way to make the verb an activity or thing, then it becomes a noun — or more specifically, a gerund. See now how the way we use a word can shift it from being a verb to a noun? Crazy!