Wiktionary:English nouns

Nouns are the most numerous of the entries in any general English dictionary. They are generally considered the easiest words to correctly label by part of speech and the easiest to define. Nevertheless there are special considerations for doing so in ways most helpful to users.

The two broad classes of nouns are common nouns and proper nouns. This page focuses on common nouns and the general characteristics of all nouns. For issues peculiar to proper nouns, see Wiktionary:English proper nouns.

Part of speech

In most cases is obvious whether a word is a noun or not. Nevertheless there are numerous borderline cases that need to be resolved before determining that a "Noun" entry or section needs to be added for a given English word.

Necessary conditions

1. All nouns can serve as subject of a sentence. An exception might be for a word that can no longer serve as subject of a sentence because its current use is limited to a small number of constructions, often treated as idioms.

Sufficient conditions

1. All words that form distinct plurals function as nouns. However, Wiktionary and other dictionaries do not normally treat "-ing" forms of verbs as separate noun entries even if the plural form exists, unless they have a distinctive meaning not immediately obvious from the definition of the verb.

Definition

Nouns are the simplest of all parts of speech to define. Nevertheless, wording some definitions may be surprisingly difficult.

Ostensive definition

The flexibility and absence of certain space limitations in computer-based dictionaries means that it is often easy to use ostensive definition, pointing or exemplifying, to help users understand what a noun means. Images, examples of literary devices, and sound files are available to illustrate meaning. Some care should be exercised to make sure that the examples selected are not unnecessarily narrow in cultural or geographic context or too specific or atypical an example of what is being examplified. To pick a simple example, a picture of a penguin is not very useful to exemplify "bird".

Synonyms

Definition by synonym is less desirable. One danger is that, often, obvious synonyms have many distinct definitions, so a user is confused by the divergent possible meanings. A useful synonym is one for which one of the first few meanings is appropriate for the term being defined. An exception is for defining terms marked as restricted to a certain technical or professional usage context, for which a synonym also so marked may be appropriate if it is the sole one so marked at the entry for the synonym.

Synonyms are often preferred if the term being defined is marked as "rare", "obsolete", "dated", "euphemistic", "pejorative", or "archaic".

Functional definitions

Though not often necessary for nouns, a definition that describes how a noun is used can be more helpful than alternative approaches. An example might be a noun used as an expletive with a meaning in that context largely unrelated to its other meanings. To call such a word an interjection often does not indicate how the word is used to construct creative grammatically correct variant forms that enhance the meaning of the expletive. The expletive elaborations of hell are examples.