Nouns answer the questions "What is it?" and "Who is it?" They give names to things, people and qualities.
Examples: dog, bicycle, man, girl, beauty, truth, world.
NOUN GENDER
In general there is no distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter in English nouns. However, gender is sometimes shown by different forms or different words.
Examples:
Different words:
Masculine | Feminine |
man father uncle boy husband |
woman mother aunt girl wife |
Different forms:
Masculine | Feminine |
actor |
actress princess heroine waitress widow |
Some nouns can be used for either a masculine or a feminine subject:
Examples:
cousin | teenager | teacher | doctor |
cook | student | parent | friend |
relation | colleague | partner | leader |
It is possible to make the distinction by adding the words 'male' or 'female'.
Example: a female student; a male cousin
For professions, we can add the word 'woman'
Example: a woman doctor; a woman journalist.
In some cases nouns describing things are given gender.
Examples:
THE PLURAL OF NOUNS
Most nouns form the plural by adding -s or -es.
Singular | Plural |
boat hat house river |
boats hats houses rivers |
A noun ending in -y preceded by a consonant makes the plural with -ies.
Singular | Plural |
a cry a fly a nappy a poppy a city a lady a baby |
cries flies nappies poppies cities ladies babies |
There are some irregular formations for noun plurals. Some of the most common ones are listed below.
Examples of irregular plurals:
Singular | Plural |
woman |
women men children teeth feet people leaves halves knives wives lives loaves potatoes cacti foci fungi nuclei syllabi/syllabuses analyses diagnoses oases theses crises phenomena criteria data |
Some nouns have the same form in the singular and the plural.
Examples:
Singular | Plural |
sheep fish species aircraft |
sheep fish species aircraft |
Some nouns have a plural form but take a singular verb.
Examples:
Some nouns have a plural form and take a plural verb.
Examples:
others include:
savings, thanks, steps, stair, customs, congratulations, tropics, wages, spectacles, outskirts, goods, wits
COUNTABLE AND UNCOUNTABLE NOUNS
Countable nouns are for things we can count:
Example: dog, horse, man, shop, idea.
They usually have a singular and plural form.
Example: two dogs, ten horses, a man, six men, the shops, a few ideas.
Uncountable nouns are for the things that we cannot count:
Example: tea, sugar, water, air, rice.
They are often the names for abstract ideas or qualities.
Example: knowledge, beauty, anger, fear, love.
They are used with a singular verb. They usually do not have a plural form. We cannot say sugars, angers, knowledges.
Examples of common uncountable nouns:
money, furniture, happiness, sadness, research, evidence, safety, beauty, knowledge.
We cannot use a/an with these nouns. To express a quantity of one of these
nouns, use a word or expression like:
some, a lot of, a piece of, a bit of, a great deal of...
Examples:
Some nouns are countable in other languages but uncountable in English. Some of the most common of these are:
accommodation advice baggage behaviour bread furniture information luggage |
news progress traffic travel trouble weather work |
BE CAREFUL with the noun 'hair' which is normally uncountable in English:
She has long blonde hair
It can also be countable when referring to individual hairs:
My father's getting a few grey hairs now
COMPOUND NOUNS
Formation
Words can be combined to form compound nouns. These are very common, and new combinations are invented almost daily. They normally have two parts. The second part identifies the object or person in question (man, friend, tank, table, room). The first part tells us what kind of object or person it is, or what its purpose is (police, boy, water, dining, bed):
What type / what purpose | What or who |
police | man |
boy | friend |
water | tank |
dining | table |
bed | room |
The two parts may be written in a number of ways:
There are no clear rules about this - so write the common compounds that you know well as one word, and the others as two words.
The two parts may be: | Examples: |
noun + noun | bedroom water tank motorcycle printer cartridge |
noun + verb | rainfall haircut train-spotting |
noun + adverb | hanger-on passer-by |
verb + noun | washing machine driving licence swimming pool |
verb + adverb* | lookout take-off drawback |
adjective + noun | greenhouse software redhead |
adjective + verb | dry-cleaning public speaking |
adverb + noun | onlooker bystander |
adverb + verb* | output overthrow upturn input |
Compound nouns often have a meaning that is different from the two separate words.
Stress is important in pronunciation, as it distinguishes between a compound noun (e.g. greenhouse) and an adjective with a noun (e.g. green house).
In compound nouns, the stress usually falls on the first syllable:
* Many common compound nouns are formed from phrasal verbs (verb + adverb or adverb + verb).
Examples: breakdown, outbreak, outcome, cutback, drive-in, drop-out, feedback, flyover, hold-up, hangover, outlay, outlet, inlet
Reference: EGU: 68-69, 78-79; PEG: 10-16.
Read the following poem and answer the questions.
THREE KINDS OF PLEASURES
I
Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin
Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles
One day one lift themselves out of the fence line
And slowly leap on the gray sky--
5 And past "them", the snowy fields.II
The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields
In Wisconsin, and on these black trees
Scattered, "one by one",
Through the winter fields--
10 We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,
And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the
combineIII
It is a pleasure, also, to be driving
Toward Chicago, near dark,
15 And see the lights in the barns.
The bare trees more dignified than ever,
Like a fierce man on his deathbed,
And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.
- key to Unit 14 -
Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. In his enormous body of works, Dickens combined masterly storytelling, humor, pathos, and irony with sharp social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined.
Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth and spent most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in his novels. He started school at the age of nine, but his education was interrupted when his father, an amiable but careless minor civil servant, was imprisoned for debt in 1824. The boy was then forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory. A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life, and he later described this experience, only slightly altered, in his novel David Copperfield (1849-1850). From 1824 to 1826, Dickens again attended school. For the most part, however, he was self-educated. Among his favorite books were those by such great 18th-century novelists as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and their influence can be discerned in Dickens's own novels. In 1827 Dickens took a job as a legal clerk. After learning shorthand, he began working as a reporter in the courts and Parliament, perhaps developing the power of precise description that was to make his creative writing so remarkable.
In December 1833 Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London, using the pseudonym Boz. A London publisher commissioned a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by the celebrated artist George Cruikshank. The success of this work, Sketches by Boz (1836), permitted Dickens to marry Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture in collaboration with the popular artist Robert Seymour. When Seymour committed suicide, another artist, H. K. Browne, called Phiz, who subsequently drew the pictures for most of Dickens's later works, took his place. Dickens transformed this particular project from a set of loosely connected vignettes into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1837). The success of this first novel made Dickens famous. At the same time it influenced the publishing industry in Great Britain, being issued in a rather unusual form, that of inexpensive monthly installments; this method of publication quickly became popular among Dickens's contemporaries.
Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited the weekly periodicals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870), composed the travel books American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), administered charitable organizations, and pressed for many social reforms. In 1842 he lectured in the United States in favor of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery. In 1843 he published A Christmas Carol, an ever-popular children's story. Dickens's extraliterary activities also included managing a theatrical company that played before Queen Victoria in 1851 and giving public readings of his own works in England and America. All these successes, however, were shadowed by domestic unhappiness. Incompatibility and Dickens's relations with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, led to his separation from his wife in 1858, after the marriage had produced ten children. He suffered a fatal stroke on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey five days later.
As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity. Among his fine works are Bleak House (1852-1853), Little Dorritt (1857), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). Readers of the 19th and early 20th century usually prized Dickens's earlier novels for their humor and pathos. While recognizing the virtues of these books, critics today tend to rank more highly the later works because of their formal coherence and acute perception of the human condition. In addition to those mentioned, Dickens's major writings include Oliver Twist (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Dombey and Son (1846-1848), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished, 1870).
- Contest 14 -