The Noun : Kinds of Nouns

A Noun is a word used as the name of a person, place, thing, animal, idea or feeling.

Note – The word thing is used to mean anything that we can think of.

Look at the following sentence:

Ashoka was a wise king.

The noun Ashoka refers to a particular king, but the noun king might be applied to any other king as well as to Ashoka. We call Ashoka a Proper Noun, and king a Common Noun.

Similarly:

Sita is a proper noun, while girl is a common noun.

Hari is a proper noun, while boy is a common noun.

Kolkata is a proper noun, while city is a common noun.

India is a proper noun, while country is a common noun.

The word girl is a common noun, because it is a name common to all girls, while Sita is a proper noun because it is the name of a particular girl.

Def. – A Common Noun is a name given in common to every person or thing of the same class or kind. (Common here means shared by all)

Def. – A Proper Noun is the name of some particular person or place.

(Proper means one’s own. Hence a Proper Name is a person’s own name).

Note 1 – Proper Nouns are always written with a capital letter at the beginning.

Note 2 – Proper Nouns are sometimes used as Common Nouns; as

1.      He was the Lukman (= the wisest man) of his age.

2.      Kalidas is often called the Shakespeare (= the greatest dramatist) of India.

Common nouns include what are called Collective Nouns and Abstract Nouns.

A Collective Noun is the name of a number (or collection) of persons or things taken together and spoken of as one whole; as,

Crowd, mob, team, flock, herd, army, fleet, jury, family, nation, parliament, committee.

A fleet - a collection of ships or vessels.

An army – a collection of soldiers.

A crowd – a collection of people.

The police dispersed the crowd.

The French army was defeated at Waterloo.

The jury found the prisoner guilty.

A herd of cattle is passing.

An Abstract Noun is usually the name of a quality, action or state considered apart from the object to which it belongs; as,

Quality – Goodness, kindness, whiteness, darkness, hardness, brightness, honesty, wisdom, bravery.

Action – Laughter, boyhood, youth, slavery, sleep, sickness, death, poverty.

The names of the Arts and Sciences (e.g. grammar, music, chemistry etc.) are also Abstract Nouns.

We can speak of a brave soldier, a strong man, a beautiful flower. But we can also think of these qualities apart from any particular person or thing, and speak of bravery, strength, beauty by themselves. So also we can speak of what persons do or feel apart from the persons themselves, and give it a name. The word abstract means drawn off.

Abstract Nouns are formed –

1.      From Adjectives; as,

Kindness from kind; honesty from honest

2.      From Verbs; as.

Obedience from obey; growth from grow.

3.      From Common Nouns; as,

Childhood from child; slavery from slave.

Another classification of nouns is whether they are “countable” or “uncountable”.

Countable nouns are names of objects, people etc. that we can count, e.g. book, pen, apple, boy, sister, doctor, horse.

Uncountable Nouns are the names of things which we cannot count, e.g. milk, oil, sugar, gold, honesty. They mainly denote substances and abstract things.

Countable nouns have plural forms while uncountable nouns do not. For example, we say “books” but we cannot say “milks”.