Noun

How to spell noun

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce noun

What does noun mean?

1. nounA word that names a person, place, thing, quality, or idea, and can act as the subject or object of a verb.

Noun in a sentence

• The teacher asked the class to underline every noun in the paragraph.

• In that sentence, 'happiness' is an abstract noun.

Where does noun come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin nomen, which simply meant 'name', and a noun is in essence the part of speech that names something: a person, place, thing, or idea. Latin grammarians used nomen to cover what we would now split into nouns and adjectives, since both name or describe. English picked the word up in the 1300s through Anglo-Norman French, where it appeared as 'noun' and 'nom', and the unusual spelling preserves that French route rather than the bare Latin form. The same nomen root spreads widely through English in words such as 'nominate', 'nominal', 'denomination', and even 'noun' itself sits next to 'name', a native Germanic cousin meaning the very same thing. Because the word is short and follows the regular 'ou' pattern of 'sound' and 'round', it gives fluent adults little trouble.

How the word is built

• noun (from Latin nomen: name); a single unanalysable root in modern English