Nouns

What is a noun?

A noun is a word that identifies a person, place, object, idea, etc. Nouns are either common nouns or proper nouns.

The different types of nouns are listed below.

Common noun

A common noun refers to places, objects, ideas, or things without specifying them, e.g., country, shoes, joy, trees. Common nouns are lowercase unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence.

Proper noun

A proper noun is specific in nature and always begins with a capital letter. These usually include names of places, phenomena, institutions, or people, e.g., Denmark, Halley’s Comet, Judaism, Sam.

Concrete nouns

Concrete nouns are nouns that refer to material things rather than abstract concepts, e.g., dogs, buildings, carrots.

If you can reach out and touch it, see it, smell it, taste it, or hear it, it’s probably a concrete noun. For example, we may not think of a “velvety voice” or a “nauseating stench” as tangible because they are not objects, but “voice” and “stench” both refer to concrete nouns.

Abstract nouns

Abstract nouns, on the other hand, are nouns that refer to ideas and non-material concepts, e.g., anger, peace, trust, anxiety. You can’t perceive these things with your senses, so they are abstract.

Abstract nouns include philosophical ideas, e.g., capitalism, democracy. They can also be proper nouns, such as when these ideas are named after people, e.g., Confucianism, Marxism.

In some rare cases, the same noun can be either concrete or abstract depending on context. This is because a concrete noun can be used figuratively, thus linking it to an abstract idea. For example, compare the noun “house” in the following sentences:

• With the help of the firefighters, we got out of the burning house.
• “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)

In the first sentence, “house” is a concrete noun because “burning house” refers to a literal house on fire. In the second sentence, “house” is an abstract noun, because Baldwin uses “burning house” to refer to an abstract idea, the racial inequality and unrest in 1960s America.

Compound nouns

Nouns can be combined to create compound nouns. Compound nouns consist of two or more nouns combined together, e.g., greenhouse, mother-in-law, ice cream.

As long as the compound noun represents one unified thing, they can be written as one word, as hyphenated words, or as separate words.

Collective nouns

Similarly, collective nouns refer to nouns that are used to identify a group of people, animals, or things, e.g., a team (of developers), a herd (of sheep), a cluster (of coconuts).

How to make nouns plural

Most nouns in English become plural by adding -s or -es. For example, one tree becomes two trees and one bush becomes two bushes.

The general rule of thumb is to add -s at the end to make a noun plural, unless the word ends in “s,” “x,” “z,” “ch” or “sh,” in which case you add an “es.” For example:

• mess → messes
• box → boxes
• patch → patches

If the “ch” ending is pronounced with a /k/ sound, add “s” instead of “es.” For example:

• monarch → monarchs
• stomach → stomachs
• epoch → epochs

If the word ends in a consonantall letters except a, e, i, o, u plus “y,” then change the “y” to an “i” and add the letters “es.” For example:

• baby → babies
• daisy → daisies
• candy → candies

However, English has many irregular plural nouns that do not follow this rule. The easiest way to remember these irregular plural nouns is to memorize them, but there are some patterns you can look out for. Some of these patterns are listed below.

There are more irregular nouns in English than the ones listed above, but this table is a good guide.

It is important to remember that there are exceptions to these rules, some of which include:

• Loan words ending in -o: pianos, cantos, photos, and zeros.
• Loan words that have been anglicized: octopuses, appendixes, vortexes.

Possessive nouns and apostrophe rules

Possessive nouns are different from plural nouns. When a noun is possessivemeans that something belongs to it, we usually add an apostrophe + “s”.

• For example, when a developer creates an app, we would say, “The developer’s app.”
• If the app was created by multiple people, we simply add the apostrophe after the “s”, i.e., “The developers’ toys.”

Apostrophes are symbols that usually represent missing letters when used within contractions. For example, in the contraction “they’re”, the apostrophe joins the words “they” and “are,” getting rid of the “a” to do so. However, with possessive nouns, you can just think of apostrophes as marking who or what is doing the possessing.

Note: A common mistake is to use apostrophe + “s” for plural nouns. For example, if we say “The alligator’s swam in the pond,” that would be incorrect. We should only use an apostrophe here if the pond belongs to the alligators, e.g., “Don’t swim in the alligators’ pond.”