Nouns

 Nouns

Main article: English nouns

Many common suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (shrinkage), -hood (sisterhood), and so on,[3] though many nouns are base forms containing no such suffix (cat, grass, France). Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned reading).

Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs frog, milk) or as concrete and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs embarrassment, prejudice). A grammatical distinction is often made between count (countable) nouns such as clock and city, and non-count (uncountable) nouns such as milk and decor. Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as "wine" in This is a good wine.

Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. In most cases the plural is formed from the singular by adding -[e]s (as in dogs, bushes), although there are also irregular forms (woman/women, foot/feet), including cases where the two forms are identical (sheep, series). For more details see English plural. Certain nouns can be used with plural verbs even though they are singular in form, as in The government were ... (where the government is considered to refer to the people constituting the government). This is a form of synesis, and is more common in British than American English. See English plural § Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural.

English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms, through the addition of -'s (as in John's, children's) or just an apostrophe (with no change in pronunciation) in the case of -[e]s plurals (the dogs' owners) and sometimes other words ending with -s (Jesus' love). More generally the ending can be applied to noun phrases (as in the man you saw yesterday's sister); see below. The possessive form can be used either as a determiner (Manyanda's cat) or as a noun phrase (Manyanda's is the one next to Jane's).

The classification of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate. It differs from the noun inflection of languages such as German, in that the genitive ending may attach to the last word of the phrase. To account for this, the possessive can be analysed, for instance as a clitic construction (an "enclitic postposition") or as an inflection of the last word of a phrase ("edge inflection").