1. Nouns
Gabriel Roberts
ELTC

2. The largest word class, nouns are ‘naming’ words
The largest word class, nouns are ‘naming’ words. There are six main groups of noun; common, proper, countable, uncountable, concrete and abstract.
The test to check if a word is a noun is to ask yourself if you can put ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’ in front of it:
a table – correct the Sunday – correct
an eat – wrong a speak - wrong

3. Common Nouns
Common means ‘general’ or ‘ordinary’ and that is exactly what these nouns are. In this group we find all kinds of things:
apple car computer shop
guitar house idea water
drink mouse bread tiger
jacket phone television

4. Proper Nouns
Proper nouns are all the ‘naming’ words for names, these nouns always start with a capital (big) letter:
Cardiff Christian Tesco Twix
Mary France Yoda Marlboro
Europe Nelson

5. Task 1
Decide which nouns are common and which nouns are proper nouns. Put a capital letter at the start of the proper nouns.
Common nouns
Proper nouns
egypt david pen desk plug phone moscow teacher
baghdad man idea meeting chicken spaghetti cat

6. Countable Nouns
Countable means ‘you can count it’ and all of these nouns can be counted. One thing is called a singular noun, we make it into a plural (more than one of the same thing) by saying a number (how many) before the noun instead of ‘a’ ‘an’ or ‘the’ and we add the plural ‘s’ to the end of the noun

7. One
Singular Noun
How Many?
Plural Noun a an
the
car
computer
dog
shop
apple
egg
island
orange
cat
ship
ant
elephant
three
two
five
twenty
twelve
four
eight
some
many
lots of
cars
computers
dogs
shops
apples
eggs
islands
oranges
cats
ships
ants
elephants

8. Notice how the green group all start with consonant sounds so we use ‘a’ the orange group all start with vowel sounds and that is why we use ‘an’. The red group use ‘the’ because the singular noun must be known, notice too that there are less exact words in the ‘How Many?’ part of the table, this is just to show that we don’t need exact numbers to say how many.

9. Be careful, some countable nouns can be irregular:
person = people man = men woman = women
sheep = sheep fish = fish child = children
bacterium = bacteria

10. Uncountable Nouns
Uncountable means that you can’t count it. This rule is the same in many languages, think; can you count sand or milk in your language?
The basic rule is that if you can’t count it or it is a lot of trouble to count it (have you tried counting sand?) then it is uncountable.

11. The common groups of uncountable nouns are:
liquids - water, wine, milk
materials - wood, metal, plastic
grains - sand, rice, sugar
gasses - air, oxygen, hydrogen
concepts - work, time, money
fractions - less than a complete thing

12. This may appear confusing because:
We count our money BUT we are really counting the coins and notes.
We count time BUT we are really counting the minutes and hours.
We even count wine BUT we are really counting the glasses of wine.
Other nouns can be countable AND uncountable depending on their meaning.

13. Task 2 Countable nouns Uncountable nouns
Use your dictionary to decide which nouns are countable and which are uncountable.
Countable nouns
Uncountable nouns
beer salt pencil chair match video metal student
carbon dioxide woman man meeting pig information mouse

14. Concrete Nouns
Concrete is solid so, these are things we can see, taste, smell, touch and hear:
beer castle bag
fish baby table

15. Abstract Nouns
Abstract nouns are the other things that we cannot see, taste, smell, touch and hear:
dream idea thought
love regret happiness

16. Task 3
Use your dictionary to decide which nouns are concrete nouns and which are abstract
Concrete nouns
Abstract nouns
regret demand shirt bathroom help sun wind wish
sadness desire book need bag tiredness desk