Nouns constitute one of the major word classes, which includes words for people, animals, and things (teacher, rabbit, desk) and also many words for abstract concepts (kindness, mystery, technology).
The surest way to identify nouns is by the ways they can be used after determiners such as the: for example, most nouns will fit into the frame “The __ matters/matter.”
Nouns are sometimes called ‘naming words’ because they name people, places and ‘things’; this is often true, but it doesn’t help to distinguish nouns from other word classes. For example, prepositions can name places and verbs can name ‘things’ such as actions.
- Our dog bit the burglar on his behind!
- My big brother did an amazing jump on his skateboard.
- Actions speak louder than words.
Not nouns:
- He’s behind you! [this names a place, but is a preposition, not a noun]
- She can jump so high! [this names an action, but is a verb, not a noun]
Nouns may be classified as common (e.g. boy, day) or proper (e.g. Ivan, Wednesday), and also as countable (e.g. thing, boy) or non-countable (e.g. stuff, money). These classes can be recognised by the determiners they combine with.
- common, countable: a book, books, two chocolates, one day, fewer ideas
- common, non-countable: money, some chocolate, less imagination
- proper, countable: Marilyn, London, Wednesday
Typical nouns share a number of grammatical properties, such as the ability to form a plural (teachers, kindnesses) and to occur after a/an or the (a teacher, the kindness of strangers). Collective nouns indicate collections of individuals (e.g. crowd, family, government) and can take either a singular or plural form of a following verb (e.g. My family are/is on holiday.)
See also noun phrase
In this activity we will look at suffixes that can change adjectives and verbs into nouns.
Try this noun phrase generator in class. Your students will enjoy creating weird and funny noun phrases using the interactive whiteboard.
Goals
- Create some new noun phrases.
- Examine what can and can't happen in noun phrases.
- Evaluate example noun phrases, looking at why they do or don't work.
Lesson Plan
The teacher explains that today, we will be generating noun phrases.
Click on the words that you think are nouns. You can deselect them by clicking on them again.
A quick activity looking at how some words can be both nouns and verbs
This is a simple starter activity that will help your students see how some words can function as both nouns and verbs. The activity is designed to be carried out in pairs around the class. One student be the noun and the other will be the verb. Each will need the same word list (which you can download and print below) or you can just use the word list on the screen.
Exploring suffixes and how they affect word class
In this activity we will look at suffixes which change verbs and adjectives into nouns. This process is a part of derivational morphology.
Noun phrases are phrases which have as their Head word a noun or pronoun.
Pronouns behave in some ways like nouns and can sometimes replace them in a sentence. For this reason, pronouns are often treated as a subclass of nouns and there are some good reasons for doing this, but they are – in some important ways – different from nouns.
Students are asked to communicate using a bank of nouns - and nothing else.
Goals
- Communicate with a partner using only nouns.
- Discuss what can and can't be easily expressed using only nouns.
- Determine which other types of words are useful for expressing complex ideas.
Lesson Plan
The teacher explains that this activity will involve you trying to express progressively more complicated concepts and actions to a partner using only these words, your own body language and imagination.
