The Nouns Page
This'll be short, nouns are easy.
"Noun" "Name"
And that's what nouns do.
They name.
They help us break the huge universe down into little, manageable bits like "table" and "chair".
They also help us think about things we can't see, but that have names, like "love" or "government" or "democracy."
I don't know why we say "noun" instead of "name", but at least it's a way to have a name for names.
One of the interesting things about this business of putting words into categories such as "nouns" and "verbs" is that mostly what gets a word into a particular category is what the word DOES, not what it IS.
Nouns NAME things. See below for some of the other jobs of nouns.
Examples of things: Man, woman, Phil, guts, baseball, hate, Sarah, sky, water, liver, sex ...
If you still don't get it, close your eyes, imagine you are looking around your room.
Name what you see.
Those names are "nouns."
Nouns do several things in our language that are discussed elsewhere in the program. To pursue, click on: DirectObjects, Indirect Objects, or Predicate Nouns.
To return to Step Two, please click Step Two
