Michael Strumpf - The Grammar Bible: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn’t Know Whom to Ask

Imagine a world without names. Imagine, for a moment, the horror and absurdity of ordering a simple meal without naming words. Ill take one of those things with the two soft, round things on the outside and one of those brown mushy things on the inside, and its got some red stuff and some yellow stuff and some round, green things on it. Oh, you must mean a hamburger! You see, I couldnt even get through this ridiculous scenario without using a couple of generic naming words, such as stuff or things. Whats in a name? Sometimes, a name is everything.

The word noun comes from the Latin word nomen, meaning name. Nouns are names of people, places, things, and ideas. Anything we can imagine has a name. If someone discovers a person, place, thing, or idea without a name, you can be sure that steps will be taken to remedy that situation.

Any nutritious sentence is chock full of nouns. In the examples below, each of the bold words is a noun.

My friend Buddy has a Ph.D. in physics.

The squirrel stole nuts from the chipmunk.

My dog watches television in the evenings.

The purpose of this exam is to scare the life out of you.

The weight of gold is measured in karats.

A Test to Determine Whether a Word Is a Noun

Q. Is there a litmus test to determine whether a word is a noun?

A. While there is no surefire way to determine whether a word is a noun in every situation, some people find it helpful to apply the following technique in puzzling it out. This procedure works for all nouns except names of specific people, places, or things, also known as proper nouns.
There are three words in the English language called articles: a, an, and the. If in doubt about whether a word is a noun, just place an article before it. If the combination makes sense on its own, the word is a noun. Test the word joy: the joy. Joy is a noun. Test pride: the pride. Pride is a noun. Try exultation: an exultation. Exultation is a noun. See, it works. All three of these article-noun combinations sound correct.
Conversely, the test differentiates other parts of speech from nouns. What happens when we apply the test to the adjective ugly: an ugly. The combination does not make sense, so we know that ugly is not a noun. The rambunctious doesnt make sense either, so rambunctious cant be a noun. Apply the test to the verb eat: an eat. The test verifies that eat is not a noun.
Beware of those sentences in which the noun is described by adjectives. For example, in the sentence The large, round apple lay on the table, the article the comes before the word large. The sentence makes perfect sense although large is still an adjective. Even though the article may not directly precede a noun, its presence in a sentence indicates that there is a noun nearby. To find the noun, we test the words that follow the article. First, test large: the large. The combination does not make sense. Next, test round: the round. This combination doesnt make sense either. Then, test apple: the apple. Eureka! Weve found the noun.

Types of Nouns

In English, nouns are classified as either common or proper.

1. Common nouns are general nouns: magnet, gargoyle, angel, orchid, subway, persimmon, petticoat. Common nouns do not begin with capital letters unless they start sentences.
2. Proper nouns are nouns that refer to specific people, places, or things: Dmitri, Sisley, Scarlett OHara, Little Orphan Annie, Rutherford B. Hayes, Marlon Brando, Ichabod Crane, Zaire, Denmark, Alcatraz. Proper nouns always begin with capital letters.