In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns may be defined as those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

In traditional English grammar, the noun is one of the eight parts of speech.

History

The word comes from the Latin nomen meaning "name". Word classes like nouns were first described by the Sanskrit grammarian IAST: Pāṇini and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax; and were defined in terms of their morphological properties. For example, in Ancient Greek, nouns inflect for grammatical case, such as dative or accusative. Verbs, on the other hand, inflect for tenses, such as past, present or future, while nouns do not. Aristotle also had a notion of onomata (nouns) and rhemata (verbs) which, however, does not exactly correspond with modern notions of nouns and verbs.Fact: date=September 2007

Vinokurova 2005 has a more detailed discussion of the historical origin of the notion of a noun.

Different definitions of nouns

Expressions of natural language have properties at different levels. They have formal properties, like what kinds of morphological prefixes or suffixes they take and what kinds of other expressions they combine with; but they also have semantic properties, i.e. properties pertaining to their meaning. The definition of a noun at the outset of this page is thus a formal, traditional grammatical definition. That definition, for the most part, is considered uncontroversial and furnishes the propensity for certain language users to effectively distinguish most nouns from non-nouns. However, it has the disadvantage that it does not apply to nouns in all languages. For example in Russian, there are no definite articles, so one cannot define nouns as words that are modified by definite articles. There are also several attempts of defining nouns in terms of their semantic properties. Many of these are controversial, but some are discussed below.

Names for things

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Prototypically referential expressions

John is no fool.

If I had a car, I'd go to Marrakech.

The first sentence above doesn't refer to any fools, nor does the second one refer to any particular car.

Predicates with identity criteria

The British logician Peter Thomas Geach proposed a very subtle semantic definition of nouns. He noticed that adjectives like "same" can modify nouns, but no other kinds of parts of speech, like verbs or adjectives. Not only that, but there also doesn't seem to be any other expressions with similar meaning that can modify verbs and adjectives. Consider the following examples.