NOUNS

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A noun names a person, a place, an animal, a thing, or an idea. Nouns can be plural or singular and can be the subject or object of a verb. For example:

• The books are on the table.
• Love is all you need.
• John is in the garden.
• London is lovely in the summer.

Sometimes, it's difficult to know if a word is a noun or another part of speech. For example, in English, the word 'love' can be a noun and it can be a verb. We need to look at how the word is used in the sentence to work out what part of speech it is. Here are some tips. Nouns are often the subject or object of a verb. Nouns often come after an article like 'a' or 'the'. Nouns often come after an adjective like 'red' or 'pretty' or 'big'. Nouns are often used with a determiner like 'this' or 'those'.

Try an exercise here where you need to find the nouns.

Common and Proper Nouns

There are different kinds of noun. First, we have proper nouns and common nouns.

Proper nouns are the names of people (Julie, Mr Johnson), places (Paris, Africa, California), organisations (Coca Cola, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford University), works of art (the Mona Lisa), days of the week (Monday), months (June, October) and festivals (Christmas, Ramadan). In English, proper nouns usually have capital letters at the beginning of the word.

Common nouns are everything else. Words like 'book', 'table', 'mountain', 'love' and 'money' are all common nouns.

Try an exercise here where you need to choose 'common noun' or 'proper noun'.

Countable and Uncountable Nouns

Second, there are two types of common noun. These are countable nouns and uncountable nouns. It's really important to know if a noun is countable or uncountable, because it changes how we use it in a sentence.

Countable nouns are things which can be counted like 'table', 'apple' or 'boy'. They usually change their form when we make a plural (they often add an 's'), and can be used with either a singular or a plural verb: one book falls, two books fall.

On the other hand, uncountable nouns are usually things which can't easily be counted, like 'love', 'rice' or 'water'. Uncountable nouns do not make a plural or change their form, and they are always used with a singular verb. We can't say one rice, two rices.

However, sometimes there's not much logic to whether a noun is countable or uncountable. For example, 'work' is uncountable but 'job' is countable. 'Trip' is countable, but 'travel' is uncountable. 'Word' is countable, but 'vocabulary' is uncountable. Sometimes, a noun is even different in US English and UK English, like 'Lego' or 'accommodation' (both uncountable in the UK but countable in the US).

Here are some kinds of nouns that are often uncountable:

• Abstract nouns (nouns that talk about ideas): love, happiness, peace, democracy.
• Subjects from school or university: Maths, French, history.
• Materials: metal, wood, plastic.
• Liquids: water, coffee, milk.
• Gases: air, oxygen, carbon dioxide.
• Things that are made up of lots of small pieces: sand, rice, salt.

Here's a list of some uncountable nouns that we often use:

Words that can be both countable and uncountable

Many, many words can be used in both an uncountable way and a countable way. This is especially true of uncountable food and drink, such as 'coffee' or 'yogurt'. When we're talking in general about coffee or yogurt, the words are uncountable. But, we can use them in a countable way when we mean 'one cup of' or 'one pot of':

• Uncountable: Coffee is my favourite drink.
• Countable: Could you buy two coffees and two teas, please?
• Uncountable: My children eat a lot of yogurt.
• Countable: I bought a pack of six yogurts.

Other words that act like this include: water, juice, salad, curry and cake.

Another way that we use uncountable nouns in a countable way is when we use the word to mean 'a kind of' or 'a type of':

• Uncountable: She loves cheese.
• Countable: That shop sells lots of cheeses (=different kinds of cheese).

Other words that can be used in this way include jam, wood, plastic, bread, metal, fabric.

There are a few words that change their meaning depending on if they used in a countable way or an uncountable way. For example:

Try an exercise here where you need to decide if the words are countable nouns or uncountable nouns.

Nouns which are always plural

Some nouns are always used in a plural form and with a plural verb. You can't count them in the normal way. Sometimes you can use phrases like 'one pair of' or 'three pairs of' if you'd like to count them. Nouns like this are often clothes, or tools that have two parts. Here's a list of words that are always plural: