Noun
name, noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A word that functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as person, animal, place, word, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality, or idea: one of the basic parts of speech in many languages, including English.
"Records have been broken, races have been dedicated, dreams have been dreamed, starts have been falsed and nouns have been verbed."
- 2 the word class that can serve as the subject or object of a verb, the object of a preposition, or in apposition wordnet
- 3 Either a word that can be used to refer to a person, animal, place, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality or idea, or a word that modifies or describes a previous word or its referent; a substantive or adjective, sometimes also including other parts of speech such as numeral or pronoun. archaic, broadly
"Q. What is a Noun? A. The Name of a Thing. Q. How many Sorts of Nouns are there? [...] A. A Noun Substantive, and a Noun Adjective."
- 4 a content word that can be used to refer to a person, place, thing, quality, or action wordnet
- 5 An object within a user interface to which a certain action or transformation (i.e., verb) is applied.
"Nouns are the data; verbs are the data transformations, and therefore verbs represent much of the complexity of systems."
- 1 To convert a word to a noun. transitive
"What is not clear is how the nouning of verbs supports Simon's assumed correspondence between mechanical designing and intentional human responses. Is it the very nouning of verbs which indicates that the above correspondence exists?"
- 1 A department of the West Region, Cameroon.
Example
More examples"Sometimes a verb is derived from a noun and sometimes it is the other way around."
Etymology
From Middle English noun, from Anglo-Norman noun, non, nom, from Latin nōmen (“name; noun”). The grammatical sense in Latin was a semantic loan from Koine Greek ὄνομα (ónoma). Doublet of name and nomen.
Related phrases
More for "noun"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.