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Topic: Noun

Nouns are a very important word class, and are often (but not always) words for people, places and things. They can be marked as plural or possessive.

Noun identification: Activity 2

I'll see you on Thursday.

Is Thursday a noun?

  • Does it represent a person, place, thing or idea?
  • Can it be singular or plural? Can you say one ___ and two ___s?
  • Can it be possessive? Can you add 's or ' at the end?
  • Can it follow the or a?
  • Can it be replaced with a pronoun like it, he, she, or they?

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Noun identification: Activity 1

Which words do you think are nouns?

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Noun phrase generator: Activity

Use the interactive whiteboard to generate weird and wonderful noun phrases. 

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Y6 GPaS Test: Identify the nouns

Find the nouns in a range of examples

Identify the nouns in each of the following examples. Click on the word (or words) to select or deselect them.

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Y6 GPaS Test: Noun or verb?

In each of the following examples, indicate whether the highlighted word is a noun or a verb:

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Y6 GPaS Test: Noun or pronoun?

Work out whether the highlighted word is a noun or a pronoun

In each of the following examples, indicate whether the highlighted word is a noun or a pronoun:

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Nouns, adjectives and determiners

This short film introduces some basic ideas of grammar that everyone should know.

In this film Professor Bas Aarts introduces three basic categories: nouns, adjectives and determiners.

Nouns: Concrete and abstract

Strictly speaking, the distinction between concrete noun and abstract noun is not really a matter of grammar, but of semantics. In other words, the decision to label a noun as concrete or abstract is more to do with the word’s meaning than its grammatical form or function.

There is very little, if any, grammatical difference between the ways in which abstract and concrete nouns operate.

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Nouns: Count and non-count

Common nouns are either count or non-count. Count nouns can be ‘counted’, as follows:

one pen, two pens, three pens, four pens...

Non-count nouns, on the other hand, cannot be counted in this way:

*one software, *two softwares, *three softwares, *four softwares...

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Englicious (C) Survey of English Usage, UCL, 2012-21 | Supported by the AHRC and EPSRC. | Privacy | Cookies