Nouns

Nouns are names of things. There are several kinds of nouns:

General or specific?

Most nouns are the name of a type of thing:

• man
• cat
• whale
• house
• city

Sometimes we want to talk about a particular thing, so we give it a name to distinguish it from all the other things like it. This name is called a proper noun and always has a capital letter:

• a man called Richard
• a cat called Garfield
• a whale called Moby Dick
• a house called Buckingham Palace
• a city called Leeds

Real or imaginary?

Most nouns are the names of real things we can see, touch, hear, smell or taste:

• cheese
• tree
• whale
• house
• city

These are called concrete nouns.

Names of ideas, things that exist only in people's heads, are called abstract nouns:

• nature is the name we give to the created world around us
• peace is what we call it when countries aren't fighting each other
• anger
• mercy
• fear

	concrete	abstract
common	vicar	religion
proper	Rev Smith	Christianity
common	soldier	war
proper	Corporal Jones	The Second World War

Quizzes

• Drag each proper noun onto its matching common noun

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Related pages:

Category: English > Grammar

Author: Mr Kershaw