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Understanding Nouns
NOUNS are defined as
naming words. They are used to name people, places, animals and things. There are three main categories of nouns as follows;
- Proper Nouns
- Common Nouns
- Collective Nouns
Proper Nouns are of specific names of people, things, animals or places.
They always start with a capital letter and cannot form plurals.
Examples of proper Nouns include:
Mombasa, Otieno, Mwende, Maranda High School, Brazil, St. James Academy etc.
Common Nouns refer to names used for classes or groups of or things. They do not start with a capital letter unless they are used at the
beginning of a sentence. They form plurals in different ways.
Examples of common nouns and their plurals include:
man-men, girl-girls, book-books, sheep-sheep, school-schools, university-universities etc.
Collective Nouns are names for a collection of similar things.
Examples of collective nouns and their plurals include:
a bale of cotton, a code of conduct, a herd of cattle, a troupe dancers,
a couple of years, an army of soldiers, a kit of tools, a galaxy of stars, a grove of tree, and a crate of soda among others.
Classification of Nouns
- Countable nouns: these can be counted individually as they have single entities (examples include chairs, teachers, boys, goats)
- Uncountable nouns: these cannot be counted and they exist in mass forms (examples include water, salt and milk)
- Concrete nouns: these are the ones that can be seen, touched or felt (examples include desks, tables, houses, pens among others)
- Abstract nouns: these are the ones that cannot be seen, touched or felt; they exist as feeling and emotions (they include love, happiness, joy, among others)
- Compound nouns: these are formed by joining two or more words, some use hyphens while other do not (examples; baby-boy, schoolgirl, son-in-law, among others)
- Group nouns: these are used to encompass a large number of things that belong to the same category. The following are some examples;
- Furniture – chairs, tables, desks, sofas, cupboards among others
- Relatives – cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters among others.
- Cutlery – knife, spoon, forks etc.
- Fruits – mangoes, pineapples, apples, bananas, etc.
- Cereals – rice, beans, maize, millet, etc.
Plurals in Nouns
There are
regular,
irregular and
zero plurals formed by nouns.
Regular plurals are formed by addition of‘s’ or ‘es’to the word (examples; boy-boys, shelf-shelves, county-counties, school-schools)
Irregular plurals are formed in different ways as hereby explained;
- Adding ‘en’after changing the vowel (examples; ox-oxen, woman-women, child-children)
- Changing ‘f’ to ‘v’ and then adding ‘es’(examples; wife-wives, hoof-hooves, among others)
- Retaining the foreign plural of the word (examples; syllabus-syllabi, alumnus-alumni, formular-formulae)
Zero plurals remain the same in singular and in plural (furniture-furniture, bedding-bedding, sheep-sheep, andstationery-stationery)
