What is a noun? You know, nouns are pretty important.
People live, die, and sacrifice for nouns. And, you thought grammar was boring.
So, what is a noun?
A noun is a person, place, or thing.
That “thing” category can be a little tricky, so let’s expand our definition to “A noun is a person, place, thing, activity, or idea.”
The Little, Brown Handbook includes quality in its description. However, I think we will stick with our expanded definition because I think it is too tempting to say an adjective can be a noun if we add the word quality to our definition. Thus, a noun is a person, place, thing, activity, or idea.
Let’s look at examples of nouns by starting with the person category:
- boy
- mother
- doctor
- Quentin
- Mrs. Jones
- Sally Sue Simpson
What about places?
- house
- basement
- cemetery
- country
- Illinois
- Death Star
Wait a minute. Can’t house qualify as a thing rather than a place? Sure. The issue is not in which category a word belongs, such as place versus thing, but whether it is a noun. By house qualifying as a place and/or a thing, we know house is noun.
Let’s look at a list of things. We might say that these are “tangible” things—things you can hold or touch.
- dog
- car
- school
- cloud
- oxygen
- hole
I know that you are thinking. “Oxygen? Hole? I can’t really get a hold of those things.” I agree. Even though oxygen and hole may be hard to grasp, they can be measured. Remember, I said the “thing” category is a little tricky, and that is why we expanded our definition to help us capture more of the tricky “things.”
Let’s look at an intangible thing category—activities:
- swimming
- reading
- cooking
- staring
- chores
- Olympics
You might say, “Do chores and Olympics really qualify as activities?” Maybe yes; maybe no; but they are both nouns. Therefore, if putting them in the activities’ category helps you identify them as nouns, then call them activities.
What? You are thinking, “‘Swimming’ is a verb, so how can it count as a noun?” Good question. Swimming can be a verb. If you are doing it, it’s a verb, but if you are talking about the activity of swimming, such as “I love swimming,” then it is a noun.
Let’s look at a list of ideas. These are also intangible “things.”
- peace
- love
- debt
- harmony
- chaos
- numbers
These are some examples of nouns. Remember, a noun is a person, place, thing, activity, or idea. Most nouns will be a single word or a compound word.
However, there are exceptions. For now, we are going to concentrate on the definition of a noun and learn more about nouns after we cover the basics about some other parts of speech.
Now I have an assignment for you. Look and listen for nouns as you go about your day. Then come back and join me for
Followed by Video 9 “Can you find prepositional phrases with nouns as their objects?”
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