Nouns: Concrete and abstract

Have you ever thought about how many words there are in a language? In many languages, an ordinary dictionary includes between 100 and 200,000 words. Here are some of them. Are you ready? Blueberry.

Stumble. Chair. Happy. Wheat flour. Entirely.

Eat. Yellow. T-shirt. Fourteen. Look at the words in the centre, inside the circle.

Can you tell what they have in common, and how they are different from the words outside the circle? Pause the film, and try to describe what properties the words in the middle have that the words outside don’t have. The words in the centre are sort of… stuff… They are words that name the stuff around us. They are a bit like labels. This kind of labeling word we call: noun.

Nouns make up a category of words: a part of speech. There are many parts of speech, but noun is the largest, the one with the most words in it. The first words that a baby learns, are often nouns: mommy, lamp, teddy. The first time you see something you never saw before, you might say: “What on earth is that?” And someone might respond to you: “That? That’s a blueberry!” Then you know that the word: ‘blueberry’ ...is a noun.

Blueberry, chair, wheat flour, T-shirt ...are definitely all nouns. They are words that label stuff that exists, stuff you can drop on your toe, or pack into a car and bring along when you move to a new house. They are simple concrete nouns. No risk that you’ll mistake them for belonging to another part of speech. But, some nouns are a bit trickier.

Try these: Birthday, responsibility, fear, morning, friendship, beginning. These words aren’t exactly things. But as words they still behave as if they were stuff: You can have a birthday, be given more responsibility, or lose your fear. ...so in grammar, they are nouns. If you want to be fancy, you can call them abstract nouns. Abstract nouns differ from concrete nouns in that they don’t have any matter, physically speaking.

But hang on! Look at these two words. Happy, fear How come one is inside and one is outside the ring? Both are about how you can feel. Well, let’s be specific here.

When you give a name to a feeling, that name is a noun. Perhaps right now you have a feeling that is best labelled with one of these nouns: Curiosity. Confusion. Fear. Surprise.

But you might also describe your feeling without using a noun. Try finishing the sentence: “I feel a bit…” I feel a bit... Curious Confused Afraid Surprised These words are adjectives, but we’ll talk about them some other time. If you have found yourself a word, and you want that word to reveal to you whether it’s a noun or not, here’s a trick you can use: Put a, the or a lot of in front of the word. If one of them makes sense, then it’s probably a noun you have found.

A fear. The offer. A lot of sand. Clear cut nouns, all three. The word afraid on the other hand… A afraid?

The afraid? A lot of afraid? No, that’s not a noun. We assign nouns to stuff we find around us: people, animals, items, feelings, substances, phenomena… Nouns can be stuff that exists as physical objects — concrete nouns — or they might be stuff that doesn’t exist in the physical world — abstract nouns. Nouns, the stuff of language.