All about English nouns

Audio: 6 min. 15 sec. 

Every type of word in English has a specific function, and nouns are one of the most important kinds.

All English sentences must contain a noun, and more complex structures are often about transforming big ideas into nouns.

This blog is here to introduce all types of nouns, how they work, and common mistakes you should avoid!

WHAT IS A NOUN?

A noun is a word that used for talking about THINGS. Anything that is physical and real OR imaginary and conceptual is a noun, and so we use these words to name topics and ideas that we want to talk about.

In a sentence, nouns are the “WHAT”; the main topic or thing that is doing an action or receiving an action.

The majority of words in the English language are nouns and they can be broken down into the following categories:

Common nouns

These are nouns that are general and name something that is not unique. DOG, CHAIR, LOVE and MUSIC are all examples of common nouns.

In this category, we can further separate nouns into concrete nouns, which are real physical objects, and abstract nouns, which are ideas or things that cannot be touched or held.

In those previous examples, dog and chair are concrete nouns, and love and music are abstract nouns.

Proper nouns

These nouns give a name to specific or unique things.

They are most commonly used for people, places and countries, such as DAVID, NEW YORK and SCOTLAND.

All proper nouns start with a capital letter, so make sure you keep that in mind when using them.

Because proper nouns are specific names and are generally well-known, they usually don't take an article like "A" or "THE" (See the blog post English Articles for more details).

Pronouns

Pronouns are words are used as substitutes for other nouns to avoid repetition.

It sounds unnatural to repeat nouns over and over in sentences, so pronouns exist to make sentences flow more smoothly.

Instead of saying something like “John likes Paris and John wants to visit Paris”, we use pronouns to replace the second set of nouns: “John likes Paris and he wants to visit it.”

Pronouns are split into first-person (I/we), second-person (you), and third-person (he, she, it/they), although they can change form depending on where they are in a sentence .

HOW DO I USE NOUNS?

In a sentence, nouns take on the roles of subject and object. The subject of a sentence comes at the start, indicates the main actor, idea or focus, and performs the main action of the sentence.

The object of a sentence comes after the main action and usually is the target of the action.

For example:

“Doctors help people”

In this sentence, the noun doctor is the subject and the noun people is the object.

Nouns can also give more information about a situation or context, such as a location or time.

“The boy exercised in the park.”

“I study English in the morning.”

In both example, "the" can be considered as part of the noun.

When using nouns, you must also consider if they are singular, plural or uncountable ("it" cannot be counted because "it" is a liquid, powder or otherwise cannot be divided).

Plural nouns often have an "S" at the end (dog > dogs, idea > ideas), but there are exceptions to this (man > men).

WHAT ARE SOME COMMON MISTAKES WHEN USING NOUNS?

For students whose native language is a European one, you might be used to nouns having gender, meaning they are male or female.

This is not the same as English, as most nouns are gender-less, or have no gender, so if you refer to a chair as He or She, it sounds extremely unusual.

We only use gendered nouns with living things and even then it is only with people, animals and some job titles.

Something that can be a little tricky is making a noun into a possessive, meaning that something belongs to it.

This is done by adding an apostrophe + "s" to the owner noun, such as “the woman's house” or “the dog's bone”.

If the noun is a plural that ends in S, the apostrophe comes at the end, like in “the boys' toys” or “citizens' rights”.

Compare this to when a pronoun is made into a possessive; each pronoun has its own form – my, your, his, her, its, our and their.

Notice that these have no apostrophe.