LESSON 3: NOUN

What Are Nouns?

Nouns are incredibly important in spoken and written language, but the good news is that they're also pretty easy to understand. 

Figuring out the basics of how nouns operate in sentences will help you learn lots of other more complex rules down the road.

Definition of Nouns

A noun is a part of speech, and parts of speech simply refer to types of words. 

You may be familiar with a lot of basic parts of speech, like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. 

Nouns identify people, places, and things. 

Nouns can be categorized as either common or proper. 

Common nouns name general people, places, things, and ideas.

Proper nouns name specific people, places, things, and ideas. 

For example, examples of nouns naming people would be:

Common Noun                     Proper Noun

      president                          Barack Obama

      teacher                              Mrs. Sanders

In our first column, we have general, or common, nouns. 

In our second column, we have specific, or proper, nouns.

Note that typically, the first letter in a common noun isn't capitalized unless that common noun is the first word in a sentence. 

The first letter in a proper noun is typically capitalized. 

Types of nouns

A noun refers to a person, animal or thing. 
Some examples are:

Nouns referring to places

Argentina

airport

Nouns referring to people

    girl              boy

      Grace         Edward

Nouns referring to animals and things

animal

book