On the surface, nouns seem like one of the most straightforward aspects of English. Unlike verbs, you don’t need to conjugate them. Unlike adjectives, they don’t follow complicated rules about order. At their core, nouns are words that identify the subject or object of a sentence. But, just like every other part of English grammar, there are many ways to divide and qualify nouns into different categories. In this post, I’ll be going over the various types of nouns, when they are used, and some relevant examples of each.
Common Nouns
This is one of the two basic noun types. Common nouns refer to the generic name for a person, place, or thing. Nouns in this category can be concrete, abstract, or collective. We’ll go deeper into those categories in a little bit. Common nouns are also nearly always lower-cased. There are two scenarios in which you will not lower-case a common noun:
- It is placed at the beginning of a sentence.
- It is used in a title or a name.
That second one can be a point of enormous difficulty for non-native English speakers because identifying the difference between a name or title and a generic description is not as apparent as one might think.
Take, for instance, the term ‘board of directors.’ This is a common compound noun, which means that it uses multiple words to describe a single concept. In this case, that concept is the group of people elected by shareholders to make decisions for a business. When used in a sentence to describe that body in the generic sense, it is uncapitalized.
Example:
The Annual General Meeting (AGM) is a time for interested shareholders to vote on appointments to the company’s board of directors, executive compensation, and other current matters.
Terms like this are also lower-cased when placed before a proper title, even when referring to a specific group.
Example:
He was elected to the board of directors of Acme Credit Union.
However, this is not the case when the term is placed after the proper title. When the word follows the title, it becomes part of the title and is thus capitalized.
Example:
He was elected to the Acme Credit Union Board of Directors
Note: Even in name and titles, connecting words such as ‘of’ are never capitalized in the middle of a sentence. The one exception to this is when the title begins with such a word.
Proper Nouns
The other major type of noun is a proper noun. A common noun covers the generic words for people, places, and things; a proper noun does the opposite. When you write the specific name for something, that is a pronoun. This includes people’s names (i.e., Jeff, Pablo, Klaus), locations (i.e., The United States, Cambodia, Turkmenistan), and official names or titles (i.e., War and Peace, Prime Minister of Japan, The Rio Times).
As shown above, proper nouns are always capitalized wherever they appear in a sentence.
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