Better Grammar in 30 Minutes a Day

Chapter 1

Nouns and Pronouns

1.1 Identifying Nouns

If you were asked to give some examples of nouns, you probably would respond with words like astronaut, Mars, or spaceship. You would be right, because a noun does name a person, a place, or a thing, but a noun can also refer to an idea such as truth or an activity such as orbiting. A noun, then, names a person, a place, a thing, an idea, or an activity.

If you are not sure whether a word is a noun, put the word the in front of it. If the word is a noun, in most cases, the phrase will make sense. In addition to the, some other common noun markers are a, an, these, those, that, and this. A noun marker is an adjective that points to the noun that follows it: a car, the Washington Monument, that ...