English

Grammar

Nouns
General Information

DEFINITION: NOUN = words used to name things, places, or

persons. Nouns naming things include both words that exist around
us (e.g. car, school, money etc), called concrete nouns, and words that
name ideas, feelings, emotions and so on (e.g. love, faith, art, beauty
etc), called abstract nouns.
Nouns include proper nouns, written with capital letter, which
refer to places, people names etc. (e.g. Iasi, Justin, Paris, Danube,
Black Sea etc), and common nouns, that refer to ordinary things
(e.g. man, woman, luck etc)
Nouns have also numbers; they can be, as in our native language,
plural or singular. A singular noun refers to one of something,
and a plural noun refers to more of something. Nouns which end
in s, -ch, -x, -sh or z are made plural by adding es.
 Nouns that end in y can follow one of two patterns. If the letter
before y is a vowel, add s to make the noun plural: boy/boys,
tray/trays. If the letter before y is a consonant, change the y to i
and add es: sky/skies, baby/babies etc. In addition, English
includes many irregular nouns, which have to be memorised:
man/men, child/children etc.
There is one special type of nouns, that may be confusing for
everyone: the nouns that have a singular form, and a plural
meaning, the so called collective nouns. For instance, crowd is a
singular noun, but it refers to many people gathered together.
Collective nouns take singular verbs. The school swims. The
crowd roars. Other collective nouns include bunch, set, bouquet,
audience, jury, family, flock, herd, and team, though there are
many more than these in the English language.
 Another type of noun which can be confusing is
noncount nouns. Noncount nouns are those which cannot be
counted without the addition of a quantifier. For example, rice
is a noncount noun. It cannot be made singular or plural
without another word to modify it.

e.g. I have one rice on my plate. (wrong)

I have many rices on my plate. (wrong)
I have one/many grains of rice on this plate. (right)
Countable nouns are for things we can count using numbers.
They have a singular and a plural form. The singular form can
use the determiner "a" or "an". If you want to ask about the
quantity of a countable noun, you ask "How many?" combined
with the plural countable noun.
Uncountable nouns are for the things that we cannot count
with numbers. They may be the names for abstract ideas or
qualities or for physical objects that are too small or too
amorphous to be counted (liquids, powders, gases, etc.).
Uncountable nouns are used with a singular verb. They
usually do not have a plural form.