4

Nouns

Once more for the record: a noun is a person, place, or thing.

As you know, the “thing” part of that equation can get a little abstract. For example: is an intangible like cowardice a thing? Yes, if it heads up a noun phrase in a sentence, it can work just like any other noun.

Cake is fattening.

(The noun cake is the subject of the verb is.)

Cowardice is shameful.

(The noun cowardice is the subject of the verb is.)

Pronouns have very different properties from those of regular nouns, as we’ll see in the next chapter. But in a sentence, they do the same jobs. They head up noun phrases to function as the subject of a clause, the object of a transitive verb, the object of a preposition, or the complement of a copular verb.

Perry waited.

(The noun Perry is the subject.)

He waited.

(The pronoun he is the subject.)

The odds favored Perry.

(The noun Perry is the object of the transitive verb.)

The odds favored him.

(The pronoun him is the object of the transitive verb.)

Fate smiled on Perry.

(The noun Perry is the object of the preposition.)

Fate smiled on him.

(The pronoun him is the object of the preposition.)

The culprit was Perry.

(The noun Perry is the complement of the copular verb.)

The culprit was he.

(The pronoun he is the complement of the copular verb.)

Nouns can sometimes do other jobs. For example, they can function attributively, attributing qualities to another word the way adjectives do. These are called attributive nouns.

a hat store

a staff meeting

a construction site

We have different ways of categorizing and understanding nouns.

Number

Count versus noncount

Gender

Case

Proper versus common

Further, some special jobs create a few subcategories.

Collective nouns

Attributive nouns

The verbing of nouns

Number

When a noun or pronoun encompasses just one thing, we call it singular: house. When it refers to more than one thing, we say it’s plural. When it refers to stuff that, instead of being countable as one or two things, is measured in quantities, we call these noncount or mass nouns. More on those in a minute.

The noun house, then, is singular. Its plural form is houses. The pronoun I, then, is singular. The pronoun we is plural.

In many other languages, the number of a noun or pronoun can affect its article, its adjectives, or even its verb. But in English our adjectives don’t change to reflect whether they’re modifying a singular or plural thing. Blue houses uses the same adjective as the blue house. It doesn’t become blues just because the noun is plural.

Our definite article doesn’t change to reflect number: the dog, the dogs. Our indefinite articles apply only to singular nouns, anyway: a cat, but not a cats. Our verbs do reflect the number of the subject: one cat is, two cats are. But in general, the concept of number has a limited application in English compared to its role in some other languages.

Perhaps the most important thing an English speaker needs to understand about grammatical number has to do not with inflecting verbs or choosing adjectives but with forming plurals.

For most regular English nouns, forming the plural is exceedingly easy. You just add s.

spoon → spoons

Nouns that end with a consonant that makes a sibilant sound (an s, z, or soft j sound) usually take es:

bosses

sashes

buzzes

faxes

Words that end in y usually form the plural by replacing the y with ies.

berries

sherries

flies

Proper nouns are the exception. They don’t change form to make a plural.

We’re having dinner with the Berrys.

My class has two Sherrys.

The McFlys are an odd family.

Words that end in f or fe often form their plurals by dropping those letters and replacing them with ves.

knife → knives

half → halves

leaf →leaves

self → selves

But there are exceptions.

pouf → poufs

gaffe → gaffes

giraffe → giraffes

chief → chiefs

And some f- or fe-ending words give you two correct options, which you can find in the dictionary.

dwarf → dwarfs, dwarves

hoof → hooves, hoofs

Those are all more or less regular nouns. That means there’s a formula you can apply to arrive at the right plural form. But there are plenty of other nouns that follow no formula. You just have to know the plural form or at least know to look it up. Here are some common ones.

man → men

goose → geese

criterion → criteria

child → children

tooth → teeth

person → people

mouse → mice

basis → bases

emphasis → emphases

stimulus → stimuli

Clearly, some of these, like criterion, are based on other languages. Many English words derived from Latin, for example, retain their Latin plural forms: curriculum, curricula. But don’t assume that a Latin-based word forms its plural according to Latin rules. When a word becomes part of the English language, then it’s up to the collective of English speakers to decide whether to carry over its Latin plural. Stadium, for example, would be stadia if we followed Latin rules. But, for the most part, we don’t. That’s why stadiums is the plural form you should use.

Count and Noncount Nouns

Think about the word song as it compares to the word music. You can have one song or two songs, but you can’t have one or two musics.

This is the difference between count nouns and noncount nouns. Count nouns have both singular and plural forms. Noncount nouns, which are sometimes called mass nouns, don’t have both a singular and a plural form. Another clue is found in the determiners that can come before these nouns. These, few, many, and other determiners that convey quantity can’t introduce a noncount noun. That is, there’s not many musics or several musics.

Noncount nouns are a little more likely to refer to abstract things: courage, intelligence, outrage, decency.

Count nouns are more likely to be quantifiable with expressions like cups of (sugar), pieces of (pie), gallon of (milk).

If you’re really on the ball, you may be thinking: But some noncount nouns, like coffee, milk, wine, and cheese, have plural forms. We sampled a variety of coffees. They serve many fine wines. So how do they still qualify as count nouns? Simple. These plural-yet-noncount nouns exist under one or two special circumstances. They may refer to different varieties, as in They sampled many different wines. Or they may parse the stuff into units that are clearly countable. I drank three coffees.

In other words, nouns like coffee and wine are noncount most of the time, except when you’re using the name to refer to individual units like servings or varieties.

Gender

Gender is a very important concept in a lot of languages. English isn’t one of them. In Spanish, for example, a noun like casa (house), has a gender, in this case feminine, which dictates things like the gender of a determiner that comes before it: la casa. The gender of the noun also affects adjectives that modify it. Beautiful, for example, has both a masculine and a feminine form: bonito and bonita, respectively. So casa bonita is correct whereas casa bonito would be wrong.

In English, the concept of gender comes up only when you’re talking about pronouns. He is the masculine singular pronoun. She is the feminine singular pronoun. And, of course, they have corresponding forms like the objects him and her and the determiners his and her.

Because English adjectives and articles don’t change to reflect gender, the only thing you need to know about gender is that it’s a grammatical concept that pertains mainly to other languages and that, when it does come up in English, it pertains mainly to a handful of pronouns you already know correspond with the sexes.

Case

In what I hope comes as a refreshing change of pace, I can tell you that case is important.

Case, in grammar, refers to whether a noun is a subject, an object, or a possessor of something. The terms for these vary a bit depending on who’s talking and whether they’re talking about case in modern English or case in other languages or eras. But here’s the terminology you’ll see describing English’s three cases.

subjective/nominative = subject of a clause

objective/accusative = object of a verb or preposition

possessive/genitive = shows possession

People sometimes also talk about dative case, which means an indirect object. But this isn’t very relevant in modern English because pronouns use the same form for direct objects and indirect objects. That is, him is the same whether it’s the direct object of a verb (I saw him) or an indirect object (We gave him a round of applause).

Here are examples of a noun in each of the cases.

Hal asked for the promotion.

(Hal is the nominative/subjective case.)

The company promoted Hal.

(Hal is the objective/accusative case.)

Hal’s new title is vice president.

(Hal’s is the possessive/genitive case.)

A noun like Hal can have any of the three cases depending on its job in a sentence. But the concept of case is far more useful in discussions of pronouns because pronouns change form more dramatically to reflect case. That is, Hal doesn’t change at all for the nominative and objective cases and changes only slightly in the possessive case: Hal’s. But the pronouns he, him, and his have those different forms to reflect different cases: nominative, objective, and possessive, respectively.

Case comes up mostly when talking about whether a pronoun should be treated as an object or a subject. For example, Thanks for taking the time to talk with John and me uses the correct objective case of the pronoun, me, as an object of the preposition with. We’ll talk more about how to choose the right pronoun case in chapter 5, this page. But for now, you might be interested to know that with John and me is the grammatical form, though with John and I is idiomatic—that is, rendered acceptable through long-term popular usage.

Forming Possessives

The way to form a possessive (genitive) of a noun in English depends on whether the noun is singular or plural, regular or irregular, and in some cases whether its singular form ends in an s.

To make a singular noun possessive, add apostrophe plus s.

the dog’s tail

the man’s story

a fool’s errand

a hero’s welcome

the tux’s fabric

To make a plural regular noun possessive, add only an apostrophe after the plural s.

the dogs’ tails

the houses’ designer

the lawyers’ conference

An irregular noun whose plural does not end with an s forms its possessive as if it were a singular noun. Add apostrophe plus s.

the men’s locker room

the children’s play area

the mice’s nest

For a singular noun that ends in s, you have a choice. You can form the possessive by adding an apostrophe plus an s (the boss’s office), which is the official editing style of much of the book-publishing world. Or you can do what a lot of news media do and distinguish between proper nouns and common nouns, adding an apostrophe only to proper nouns and an apostrophe plus s to common nouns.

the boss’s office

(Correct in every style.)

James’s office

(Correct in most book publishing.)

James’ office

(Correct in most news media.)

Editing rules for forming possessives of nouns ending in s add some further complications. But they vary from style to style and none are absolute rules. For instance, some styles that require apostrophe plus s say to drop the extra s if the word that follows also begins with s.

the boss’s chair

the boss’ seat

Words that end in x, ch, z, and similar sibilant sounds do not have special rules for forming possessives in most modern publishing. Treat them as any other noun ending in s.

the tax’s opponents

the march’s participants

the quiz’s difficulty

For anyone not beholden to a particular editing style, the easiest course it usually to add apostrophe plus s to form the possessive of all singular nouns, regardless of which letter they end with.

SHARED POSSESSIVES

Sometimes, two or more noun phrases show possession in the sentence: Ed and Joe’s restaurant. Ed’s and Joe’s houses. The rule for adding the possessive marker is this: if the nouns share possession of the thing, they also share just one apostrophe-plus-s, which is added to the final noun. So Ed and Joe’s restaurant uses just one possessive marker, added to Joe, indicating that the two both own the restaurant. But Ed’s and Joe’s houses adds a possessive marker to each noun, indicating that each of them separately owns a house. Ownership is not joint.

OF-PHRASES TO SHOW POSSESSION

The genitive case is the most common way to show possession, but there is another, which is illustrated in the following examples.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It could pass through the eye of a needle.

The howl of the wolf could be heard.

For all practical purposes, the of-phrases in the above examples mean, respectively, the iceberg’s tip, the needle’s eye, and the wolf’s howl.

John’s wallet is also, technically, the wallet of John. So just as apostrophe-plus-s makes a noun possessive, the of-phrase construction can, too, in many cases. But the term genitive excludes the of-phrase construction. Instead, that term is reserved for the form the noun takes when you add the possessive marker.

The of-phrase construction is nonstandard in most situations. The wallet of John doesn’t sound as natural as John’s wallet, and for that reason, the of-phrase is the poorer choice in many cases. It’s most popular when the writer or speaker wants to put emphasis on the possessor instead of the thing possessed, since the last word in a sentence or clause can have the biggest impact. The tip of the iceberg is an example. The alternative form, the iceberg’s tip, would put the emphasis on tip, which is usually not the effect that users of this term are going for.

DOUBLE GENITIVE

When you refer to a friend of Jesse, the of-phrase alone meets all the requirements to show possession. The friend belongs to Jesse. No question.

So how do you explain this form?

a friend of Jesse’s

Expressions like this double up on the possession by using both the apostrophe-plus-s and the of-phrase construction. For that reason, they’re called double genitives. Also for that reason, some people consider them an error.

True, a friend of Jesse’s contains a redundancy and a sort of mathematical imprecision. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s idiomatically acceptable. And to see just how unrealistic it would be to prohibit the double genitive, consider the following term:

a friend of me

People usually say a friend of mine. That’s technically a double genitive because mine is possessive. A friend of mine, then, contains the same alleged error as a friend of Jesse’s. They both combine an of-phrase with a genitive noun phrase. So to take a friend of mine out of double genitive form, you’d have to replace mine with me, giving you a friend of me. Clearly, that’s not realistic. So the double genitive, as it’s called, can’t be labeled an error.

QUASI POSSESSIVES

Some terms use the possessive form even though it’s a big stretch to say there’s any possession going on.

two weeks’ pay

your money’s worth

for goodness’ sake

These quasi possessives, as they’re called, are better understood as figures of speech than as logical constructions. No one ever means to talk about how the sake belongs to the goodness or how the pay belongs to the weeks. They’re just expressions that, through long-established usage, are treated as possessive. (Chicago editing style, which normally calls for an s after the apostrophe in a possessive like goodness, makes an exception when the following word is sake.)

POSSESSIVE VERSUS ATTRIBUTIVE FORMS

Terms like farmers market, teachers union, kids menu, and homeowners policy often drop the apostrophe. Is that wrong?

Not really.

The idea behind these apostrophe-less terms is that the words farmers, teachers, kids, and so on, are not intended as possessors but as modifiers. Adjectives. That is, they’re attributive—at least in the interpretation of anyone who decides to omit the apostrophe. By doing so, you treat the first word as a modifier of the second. In essence, it’s an adjective.

That’s not to say that you can’t treat them as possessives, too. If you mean that the market belongs to the farmers, you should write farmers’ market. If you mean that the union belongs to the teachers, you should write teachers’ union.

Often, the implied word for comes into play. If it’s a policy for homeowners, the apostrophe is commonly omitted: homeowners policy. If it’s a massage for couples, you’re likely to see it written couples massage. Conversely, if the sentence could be understood with an of-phrase construction, the possessive marker is often used: the couples’ retreat could be expressed as the retreat of the couples. The homeowners’ questions focused on financing.

But myriad exceptions make this guideline less than perfect. Kids menu is an example. There’s no question that menu is for and not of kids. Yet it’s commonly written both with and without an apostrophe.

Common Nouns and Proper Nouns

Like common nouns, proper nouns function as the heads of noun phrases. They’re often names of people and places.

They visited sunny Atlanta.

(Atlanta is a proper noun serving as the object of the verb visit.)

David works every day.

(David is a proper noun serving as the subject of the verb works.)

Proper nouns have two properties that distinguish them from common nouns. First, proper nouns are customarily capitalized. Second, as we saw above, while irregular common nouns form their plurals in irregular ways, proper nouns are unchanging in their plural form.

The recipe calls for fresh berries.

(Common noun berry forms its plural by replacing y with ies.)

We’re visiting the home of the Berrys.

(Last name Berry forms its plural by adding s.)

We talked to the children.

(Common noun child has the irregular plural children.)

We talked to the Childs.

(Last name Child forms its plural by adding s.)

Proper nouns that end with z, ch, x, sh, and similar sounds form their plurals by adding es, the same way many common nouns do.

Those two are klutzes.

(Common noun klutz forms its plural by adding es.)

The Chavezes are coming for dinner.

(Proper noun Chavez forms its plural by adding es.)

Witnesses report seeing three or four flashes of light.

(Common noun flash forms its plural by adding es.)

Johnny and June were the Cashes.

(Proper noun Cash forms its plural by adding es.)

The rule about capitalizing most proper nouns extends to nicknames.

the King of Swing

the Garden State

Mom

Note that in a mom and my mom, mom is a common noun begun with a lowercase letter. But when used as a direct address, it is treated as a proper noun: Mom. The same is true for Dad, Sis, Grandpa, Boss, and similar terms when used as a moniker of the individual person rather than as a generic term.

Collective Nouns

Some nouns are understood to refer to more than one person or thing even though the noun itself is singular in form.

family

council

staff

herd

jury

team

There’s no set rule for whether these nouns take plural or singular verbs. American English tends to favor singular verbs with collective nouns in many cases.

The whole family is going to be there.

The council votes tonight.

The jury is deliberating.

But sometimes a plural verb is more natural.

The staff want to go home.

Other times it depends more on meaning: when individuals within the collective are acting independently of each other, a plural verb may seem more natural.

The family are all fighting among themselves.

For nouns like team, majority, crew, jury, and audience, choose the verb form that seems most natural. The majority are voting for the incumbent. The team is in the locker room.

Attributive Nouns

As we’ve seen, words that are categorized as one part of speech can often fill other roles. Attributive nouns modify other nouns, even though they themselves are categorized not as adjectives but as nouns. A shoe store is an example. Shoe is not an adjective. It’s a noun. Yet in a shoe store, it’s functioning as an adjective because it’s modifying the noun store. More technically, we would say it’s functioning attributively. Here are some more examples:

agenda item

case studies

house party

government official

In each of these examples, the first word is a noun. If you recall from chapter 3, this page, membership in a word category like noun or adjective has mainly to do with whether dictionaries believe a word has earned admission into the club, so to speak. When enough people use a word as an adjective, lexicographers record it as one, providing the word with as official a designation as you’ll find anywhere.

But in each example above, the first word is not classified as an adjective. They’re all nouns functioning as adjectives. This is grammatical and standard—one of the perks of a flexible language like English.

The Verbing of Nouns

Some verbs clearly derive from nouns. To club someone is an action formed from a reference to a noun: the club itself. Examples of this verbing of nouns are too numerous to list. To paint something. To house something. To hammer something. The list is almost endless.

These new verbs come into existence through usage. Someone says beer me, other people follow suit, and if the trend continues, eventually the noun beer has a shot at getting into dictionaries as a verb.

Transitions like these always involve a period in which the usage is technically incorrect. Only time can tell whether any given noun will gain full acceptance as a verb. Like many things in language, there are risks in using terms that haven’t gained full acceptance: some listeners will think you’re wrong. But it’s often worth the risk. For example, I couldn’t have discussed this topic without bending the rules because, since the word verb is itself a noun, the term the verbing of nouns wouldn’t be possible without bending the rules.