A word for a thing, person, place, idea or quality.
Also called: substantive.
In precise terms
A lexical class whose members typically head noun phrases, can take determiners and modifiers, and in many languages inflect for number, case or definiteness. Membership is decided by grammatical behaviour in a given language, not by meaning alone.
An example
La profesora escribió una carta.
The teacher wrote a letter.
What is going on here
Spanish 'profesora' and 'carta' are nouns: each takes a determiner ('la', 'una'), each carries gender and number, and each could stand as the subject or object of the sentence. 'Escribió' cannot do any of those things — it is the verb.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
Almost every dictionary entry, grammar table and vocabulary deck is organised by word class first. If you cannot tell a noun from a verb in your target language, you cannot use its dictionary efficiently — and in languages that inflect nouns for case, you cannot choose the right form.
Across languages
The behaviour that identifies a noun differs sharply by language. Spanish nouns carry gender and number; Turkish nouns take case suffixes but no gender; Mandarin nouns take neither, and are identified by their distribution and by the classifiers they occur with. In some languages the noun/verb boundary is much less sharp than in English, and word class has to be argued for rather than assumed.
Related terms
- DeterminerBeginner — A noun-phrase item, such as an article or demonstrative, that helps anchor or quantify what the phrase refers to.
- VerbBeginner — A word for an action, event or state — what is happening.
- SubjectBeginner — The part of a clause that the verb agrees with — usually who or what performs the action.
- ObjectBeginner — The part of a clause that the action is done to.
- Grammatical genderIntermediate — A system sorting nouns into classes that other words must agree with.
- Grammatical caseIntermediate — Endings on nouns showing their role in the sentence — who did it, who it was done to, whose it is.
- Classifier (numeral classifier)Intermediate — A grammatical element used in counting constructions to mark a conventional class for the noun being counted.
Where to go next
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.