EVOLVE Educational Vocational Objective Learning of Vernacular English

Nouns

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                        a 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                 television          

guitar                house               idea                              drink                 mouse

bread                water                tiger                              jacket               phone

 

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

Cardiff               Christian           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.

 

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.

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.

  

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