I've been doing some blog posts on grammar recently, and I thought I'd focus in nouns for this one.

Nouns seem obvious when we hear, read or speak them: they are the naming words, words or phrases that refer to a person, place, object, event, substance, quality or quantity. Straightforward stuff, isn’t it? However, once you try to describe exactly what a noun is, things begin to seem a little more complicated.

The word noun comes from the Latin nomen, which simply meant name, but ancient Roman grammar experts also ruled that adjectives were the same part of speech as nouns. In fact, they were known as adjective nouns as opposed to the substantive nouns like donkey, justice and fridge.

Some lexicographers believe that nouns can be identified and defined by their syntactic usage; if it’s the object or subject of the sentence, for example, it’s a noun. When the cat sat on the mat, one noun was making itself comfortable on top of another.

Consider this too: nouns are not always just one word – as noun phrases like swimming on a hot day at the beach perform exactly the same way in a sentence as might swimming on its own.

Classifications of a noun

Nouns are organised into several different groups. The ones we tend to learn about when young are the common nouns and proper nouns: for example, a king is more common than Paul Gascoigne is, an example of a proper noun.

Concrete nouns represent items that you actually sense (door, album), while abstract nouns deal with the more imaginary stuff (honesty, emergency) that is somehow indispensable.

If you have a shadowy group of people that you need to bundle up into one noun, then a collective word like organisation will allow you to describe their activities in the singular (the organisation was founded) or plural (the organisation are monitoring), as feels appropriate.

Add an s and an apostrophe to the end, and you have a possessive noun, as in Fiddler’s Green. Bunch your noun together with another one are there you have a compound noun, like picnic table. Finally, there are the countable and uncountable nouns, the latter unable to form plural: for example, dust or heating. See more noun examples.