Noun
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
A noun is perhaps the most basic of the parts of speech. Nouns are used in sentences in two different ways: as subjects (performers of action), or objects (receivers of action); in the sentence "John wrote me a letter", "John" is a subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects. Common wisdom has it that a noun is the name of a "person, place, or thing".
Nouns are grouped into proper nouns (e.g. "Janet"), common nouns (e.g. "girl"), and pronouns (e.g. "she" and "which").
A proper noun (also called proper name) is a noun that stands for one thing and that thing only. The meaning of a proper noun, outside of what it refers to, is often arbitrary (for no exact reason) or irrelevant (has nothing in common with it). For example, someone might be named Tiger Smith even though he is not a tiger or a smith. Because of this, they are often not translated between languages, although they may be transliterated--for example, the German surname "Knödel" becomes "Knoedel" in English, as opposed to "Dumpling".
Proper nouns are capitalised in English and most or all other languages that use the Latin alphabet; this is one easy way to recognize them. Note however that in German all types of nouns are capitalised. In English, trademarks (e.g. "Coca Cola" and "Kleenex") are also capitalised. Words made from proper nouns (e.g. "Aristotelian") are also capitalized; this is probably due to English's Germanic roots, and does not happen in Romance languages. The word "I" is really a pronoun although it is capitalized in English and seems to mean a unique (one of a kind) object.
Sometimes the same word can appear as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such thing is special; for example:
- there can be many gods, but there is only one God.
- there can be many internets (two or more networks connected together), but the largest internet in the world is the Internet.
In some languages, such as Toki Pona, proper names are defined as adjectives that modify a common noun. This can also be found in the English language in some phrases like "English language".
A mass noun is a type of common noun that represents more than one of something but with no exact number. Mass nouns do not need limiting modifiers ("an", "two", "several", "many", etc.) and are not normally pluralized. Examples from English include "cheese", "laughter", and "precision".
Examples of nouns:
- Janet is the name of a girl.
- Off-key whistling is annoying to me, but not to everybody.
- Cleanliness is next to godliness.
- The World Wide Web has become the least expensive way to publish information.
See also:
