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Topic: Common noun

Nouns and vocabulary

Objective

To explore the meaning of simple, everyday nouns and how they relate to your experience of the world.

Things like a chair, a fork, a dog, a horse, a house, a kennel, a girl, a nurse, a boy and a policeman are something that we can see and touch. They exist in reality and are observable. The names for them are concrete nouns.

Other nouns refer to things which we cannot see or touch like happiness or time. Such nouns are abstract nouns.

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Nouns

In terms of meaning, nouns are sometimes described as ‘naming words’ – words for people, animals and things. The noun class does include many words of this kind: brother, baby, rabbit, horse, handbag, chair. These all refer to physical beings or objects – they are concrete nouns. But there are also many abstract nouns – nouns with abstract (non-material) meanings, like pleasure, sight, kindness.

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