NounsGabriel Roberts

ELTC

The largest word class, nouns are ‘naming’ words. There are six main groups of noun; common, proper, countable, uncountable, concrete and abstract.

The test to check if a word is a noun is to ask yourself if you can put ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’ in front of it:

a table – correct the Sunday – correct

an eat – wrong a speak - wrong

Common Nouns

Common means ‘general’ or ‘ordinary’ and that is exactly what these nouns are. In this group we find all kinds of things:

apple car computer shop

guitar house idea water

drink mouse bread tiger

jacket phone television

Proper Nouns

Proper nouns are all the ‘naming’ words for names, these nouns always start with a capital (big) letter:

CardiffChristian Tesco Twix

Mary France Yoda Marlboro

Europe Nelson

Task 1

Decide which nouns are common and which nouns are proper nouns. Put a capital letter at the start of the proper nouns.

Common nouns Proper nouns

egypt david pen desk plug phone moscow teacher

baghdad man idea meeting chicken spaghetti cat

Countable Nouns

Countable means ‘you can count it’ and all of these nouns can be counted. One thing is called a singular noun, we make it into a plural (more than one of the same thing) by saying a number (how many) before the noun instead of ‘a’ ‘an’ or ‘the’ and we add the plural ‘s’ to the end of the noun

One Singular Noun How Many? Plural Noun

aaaa

ananananthethethethe

carcomputer

dogshopappleegg

islandorange

catshipant

elephant

threetwofive

twentytwo

twelvefoureightsomemanysomelots of

carscomputers

dogsshopsappleseggs

islandsoranges

catsshipsants

elephants

Notice how the green group all start with consonant sounds so we use ‘a’ the orange group all start with vowel sounds and that is why we use ‘an’. The red group use ‘the’ because the singular noun must be known, notice too that there are less exact words in the ‘How Many?’ part of the table, this is just to show that we don’t need exact numbers to say how many.

Be careful, some countable nouns can be irregular:

person = people man = men woman = women

sheep = sheep fish = fish child = children

bacterium = bacteria

Uncountable Nouns

Uncountable means that you can’t count it. This rule is the same in many languages, think; can you count sand or milk in your language?

The basic rule is that if you can’t count it or it is a lot of trouble to count it (have you tried counting sand?) then it is uncountable.

The common groups of uncountable nouns are:

liquids - water, wine, milk

materials - wood, metal, plastic

grains - sand, rice, sugar

gasses - air, oxygen, hydrogen

concepts - work, time, money

fractions - less than a complete thing

This may appear confusing because:

• We count our money BUT we are really counting the coins and notes.

• We count time BUT we are really counting the minutes and hours.

• We even count wine BUT we are really counting the glasses of wine.

• Other nouns can be countable AND uncountable depending on their meaning.

Task 2

Use your dictionary to decide which nouns are countable and which are uncountable.

Countable nouns Uncountable nouns

beer salt pencil chair match video metal student

carbon dioxide woman man meeting pig information mouse

Concrete Nouns

Concrete is solid so, these are things we can see, taste, smell, touch and hear:

beer castle bag

fish baby table

Abstract Nouns

Abstract nouns are the other things that we cannot see, taste, smell, touch and hear:

dream idea thought

love regret happiness

Task 3

Use your dictionary to decide which nouns are concrete nouns and which are abstract

Concrete nouns Abstract nouns

regret demand shirt bathroom help sun wind wish

sadness desire book need bag tiredness desk