Questions tagged [nouns]
A noun is a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify people, places, or things, or to name a particular one of those.
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Is "people" a countable or a non-countable noun?
I saw these sentences on the Internet:
There are three people here.
A few people didn't enjoy the play.
Now I'm not sure whether people and other collective nouns like team, family and police are ...
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They write in their school diary (or) diaries?
Currently, I am using a children's English coursebook called Gold Experience A2, by Pearson, it's for a private student of mine. It's supposed to help young learners prepare for the KEY exam, and it ...
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Why do we say "I love cake" but "I love cars"?
Why do some nouns need to be in the plural for that structure to work, while some are ok in the singular? E.g.: I love pizza, I love beef, etc.
I always thought it was a matter of countable x ...
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Grammatical gender of the word "child"
I've been taught that a child is gender-neutral noun. But in the textbook on linguistics I've been reading, the noun is used as feminine. For example, a sentence in the book goes like this:
The child ...
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Can an 'adverb' modify 'nouns/pronouns'?
While answering to this question here, very interesting discussion took place with CopperKettle.
It's absolutely right that adverbs modify many things, but nouns/pronouns.
But then, expressions ...
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How can I identify a word that ends with "-ing" as being a noun, a verb, or an adjective?
How can I distinguish between words which have the -ing in a sentence that are nouns, verbs, or adjectives?
For example sometimes -ing come with word to give us a noun, and sometimes a verb or an ...
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a / an - adjective - noun
The article a becomes to an when the following noun starts with a vowel.
Not a adventure but an adventure.
But how is it, when there's an adjective before the noun?
Not a thrilling adventure or ...
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Uncountable nouns taking singular verbs when they are used as a body or a group
1) The team is at the top in this competition.
2) The team are full of high spirits.
There are certain nouns which take singular verbs when referred as a group or body. A team is probably never ...
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Relative clause applies to all nouns in the list or the last noun only
When a list of nouns is followed by relative clause or -ed participle, how can we decide whether the relative clause applies only to the last noun in the list or to all the nouns in the list...
For ...
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Difference between gerunds and nouns ending in -tion
As we know, gerunds have the same function as nouns and can be substitute in noun phrases. Additionally as far as I know, meaning of them would be the act of doing that verb. (I don't know whether ...
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Is "mathematics" singular or plural?
I always say "mathematics is funny" (ok, maybe many of you disagree about the adjective), but then I noticed that "mathematics" seems to be a plural, like the Greek word from which it derives.
Am I ...
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How can I correctly form collocations such as 'cough trouble'?
I read a new collocation cough trouble which I could not found in any dictionary.
How can I form a noun + noun collocation?
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What is understood if I say "I'm an English teacher"?
What is understood if I say "I'm an English teacher"?
"I teach English", or
"I'm a teacher coming from England"?
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What's wrong with "Most people in the country would like to own their house some day."?
The following is a problem from my textbook.
The following sentence has an error. Find it and correct it.
(1)[Most people] in the country (2)[would like] to own (3)[their house] (4)[some day].
...
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“The,” “a” or no article: “See you in _____ court.”
Why is an article not used before the noun in sentences such as the one below?
See you in (the, a) court.
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Tap, faucet, spigot - what are the differences?
What are the differences between tap, faucet and spigot?
Are they regional variants?
(ngram isn't particularly helpful in determining that, due to other, more popular meanings of 'tap').
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"The cow" OR "a cow" OR "cows" in this context
Article before a common noun:
The cow--- a particular cow.
A cow--- any cow.
Cows.---all of them.
But while reading an essay on cow, we usually get to see:
The cow is a very useful ...
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'Golden spoon' or 'Gold spoon' -if the spoon is made of gold?
Adjective or noun?
A golden spoon or A gold spoon
What to use? A spoon is made of gold.
Dictionary says:
golden (adjective) -made of gold
But then... (the same page)
golden (adjective) - ...
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Noun used as an adjective in "passenger seat"?
A friend of mine (a native speaker of Japanese) wrote "passenger's seat", which a native speaker of English corrected to "passenger seat".
Onelook.com has entries for the latter but not the former, ...
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“Was” or “were” in sentence where no noun subject exists
I can't figure out if the below sentence should use “was” or “were”, since I'm not sure what the subject of the sentence is. Is the sentence incomplete? How do I handle this kind of sentence, where no ...
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Referring to letters of the alphabet
In Italian, letters can be referred to using their noun. For example, when speaking of the letter M, I could say La lettera emme è l'undicesima lettera dell'alfabeto italiano. (that is, "M is the 11th ...
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"Persons" versus "individuals"
In Italian, the equivalent of person is persona, whose plural is persone; there is also another word that could be used instead of persone (gente) but that is not the plural of persona. It cannot be ...
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Can "uncountable" nouns be counted?
AH reads: staff, n. A group of assistants to a manager, executive, or other person in authority.
Four staff moves at Vanquish Recruitment.
What is the meaning of "four staff" in the headline above:
...
user114
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Is "life" a countable noun in English?
I am a learner of English. Sometimes I see an article (a and the) before the noun (life) but sometimes I also see the noun without any article. So I am confused when should I use an article before the ...
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Friend or Friends in this sentence
I came across this English sentence when I was reading an article:
Have you ever met anyone on holiday who you were friends with at school or university?
Wasn't it supposed to be "friend" in place ...
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Singular vs plural with multiple nouns stringed together
As a general rule, I learnt that when stringing together multiple nouns to form a noun phrase, the nouns acting as adjectives lose their ending "s", even if they carry a plural meaning.
For example:
...
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gerund and noun applications
This sentence below is extracted from vocabulary for IELTS book (recording scripts part).
But nowadays all we seem to do is argue and that causes a lot of conflict between us.
Why she's saying argue?...
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Questions about noun compounds
What exactly are "noun compounds"?
Is it possible to use any words to construct a noun compound?
How we can distinguish between a noun compound and an adjective compound?
user109181
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What part of speech is an “-ing” form at the very beginning of a sentence?
I have been reading this paper and the following sentence is quite confusing to me:
Hiking interest rates to get inflation under control when unemployment
is rising could push unemployment even ...
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Should we use possession or can we consider nouns as adjectives?
I very often come across different words which I need to use as nouns or as adjectives. For some words I can look up in a dictionary whether they can be an adjectives or not. But many of them are not ...
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Phone or phones
I have some difficulties when I want to talk with a group of people in using nouns. Should I use all nouns in plural form?
For example, when I am talking to a group of students and want to teach ...
raya bemani
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When is Earth upper case?
I recenty got my essay back from my teacher and she said that it was wrong to use upper case "Earth". When I'm writing Earth, I'm referencing to the planet Earth, not soil. This is the sentence which ...
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Can a noun be used to describe another noun
While reading an article I came across the following sentence:
The more successful group, in terms of their creativity quality of their solutions...
Is this grammatically correct? Can a noun be ...
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"A part" or "parts"?
When you refer to a generalized part of a generalized plural noun, should I use "a part" or "parts"?
do you have to use " city names" as "a part/parts" of " commercial addresses"?
This is the only ...
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"Six women were there" - is six a noun or an adjective?
Six women were there.
Is the number "six" a noun or an adjective here? Or maybe "six women" is a compound noun?
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Grammar: Phrase and Actions
Our clothes sell so well in this country that we have no need to export.
Two questions.
Our clothes sell so well in this country...
Is this part of the sentence a noun phrase although it has ...
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Why is Zika capitalized and chikungunya and yellow fever are not?
I noticed the usage on the CDC website. I don't understand why Zika is capitalized while the other two were in lower cases.
There is no vaccine to prevent or medicine to treat chikungunya virus ...
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Is the term 'Invalid' applicable for human beings?
As I was reading a novel 'What Katy Did', I came across an interesting mention of the word Invalid.
His wife was said to be an invalid, and people, when they spoke of him, shook their heads and ...
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Can "zero" be used to describe uncountable nouns?
“There was zero courage in this verdict,” he said. ”I think this goes to the jury not wanting to make a difficult decision."
I learned that mass nouns cannot be enumerated.
Yes, I know that zero ...
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Difference between "Trip", "Travel", and "Journey"
Are there any significant differences between words trip, travel, and journey (nouns)?
Are those interchangeable words or are there any specific expressions which uses one of them but not another?
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What's the correct unit for homework?
Consider the case when a teacher has thirty students in the class. The noun "homework" is uncountable so he cannot say "I have thirty homeworks to grade every week." My question is that if there is ...
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Is it 'thumb is up' in 'thumbs up'?
It was a thumbs up on the new filtration plant at Thursday's village board meeting
This is so common but then I never thought too deep unless I became a fan of English language after joining this site!...
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Difference between "search of" and "search for"
I was writing a classified for a company, but I got confused between two different usage of 'search'.
Read the following sentences:
If you're in search of a quality marketing company, then your ...
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Why is oak considered an adjective in 'the big oak tree'?
I have been reading grammar instructions on this website.
When I came across the bottom of the page, there was a quiz. In the quiz it was noted that the word oak in the following sentence is an ...
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Why do we say 'The earth' and not 'An earth'?
As I understand, noun which is singular and start with vowels, we put an article "an" in front of it. ( e.g an eye, an ear )
But why it is not "an earth" and why "the earth"?
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Difference between "female" and "woman"
I haven't been able to find any good articles describing rules (or patterns) specifying use of the words female and woman.
Let's take the following sentences as an example:
(assuming we have a man ...
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In the sentence, "I don't know why, but …", is "why" a noun?
I don't know why, but there's something I don't like about that woman.
In this sentence, is "why" a noun? If not, what is it? I can understand the meaning, but I am confused about the use of "why".
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That's a misunderstanding
That's a misunderstanding.
Why do you say "a misunderstanding", instead of that's misunderstanding?
Why do you need an article for this gerund?
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Is the word "uncle-in-law" used?
Is the word "uncle-in-law" commonly used when talking about the husband married to your mother's sister?
Or is this person typically still called your "uncle", even though the person is not a blood ...
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Why is 'for examples' wrong?
If you want to take an example or several examples, you use the phrase 'for example,' not 'for examples.' Though the word 'example' is a countable noun, why is 'for examples' wrong?
Tulip Saita