Other nouns, called mass nouns or noncount nouns, name things that are usually not counted, even when the amount grows larger. Those that can be thought of in the plural are called count nouns the things they name can be counted and enumerated. Thus we have another way to categorize nouns. (Can you think of the seventh one?*) And then, of course, there are nouns borrowed from other languages that keep their non-English plurals ( bacterium/bacteria, chapeau/chapeaux, kibbutz/kibbutzim ). Seven English nouns form their plural by changing the vowel in the middle of the word: woman/women, man/men, goose/geese, tooth/teeth, foot/feet, louse/lice.
Some nouns have a plural form identical to that of the singular: sheep/sheep. These include child/children, knife/knives, and a number of others. Several nouns form the plural in a different way. Nouns ending in the sounds, /tʃ/,, /dʒ/,, /ʃ/,, /ʒ/,, /s/, or /z/ also have plurals ending in -es ( bus/buses, ash, ashes, judge/judges ). Some nouns ending in –o (but not all) add -es. ) To form the plural, most common nouns simply add an -s ( teachers, classrooms, smartphones ). Oh, no, the Smiths are coming to dinner again. (Proper nouns are pluralized only in special circumstances: There are many Springfields in the United States. The plural form of a common noun names a set or group. A common noun refers to a generic person, place, or thing: teacher, classroom, smartphone. A proper noun designates a particular person, place, or thing and is normally capitalized: Shakespeare, Mexico, the Pentagon.
Nouns are typically said to fall into two categories: proper noun and common noun. In any of those positions, it can be modified by an adjective or adjective phrase: a talented but quirky artist. The word is defined further in terms of the way it functions in the language-as a subject or object in a sentence or as the object of a preposition. Most of us learned the classic definition of noun back in elementary school, where we were told simply that “a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing.” That's not a bad beginning it even clues us in to the origin of the word, since noun is derived ultimately from the Latin word nōmen, which means “name.” As we see from its dictionary definition, a noun can name not only a physical thing but also abstract things such as a state ( happiness ) or a quality ( beauty ).
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