Nouns - Common and Proper - learn the difference.

This lecture in the noun section is about common and proper nouns One way of dividing nouns as into common nouns and proper nouns.

Common nouns are people, places, things and feelings Some examples of common nouns of people: lady, man, teacher, pupil, children, child, nephew, niece, father, mother, grandparent.

As you can see, these aren’t the individual people, they’re just the types of people Or places.

Again, not specific places but general places as in town, city, village, pub, restaurant, cafe, library, cinema, park, country, hill, valley.

Things that are common nouns: taxi, car, lorry, van, table, chair, bench, apple, pear, peach, carrot, book, magazine, leaflet, mouse, cat, dog, horse Or common nouns could also be feelings: love, hate, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, truth, trust.

And proper nouns are names, places, brands, titles.

Proper nouns always start with a capital letter no matter where it appears in the sentence.

Some examples of names that are proper nouns: John, Jon,

Elizabeth, Lisa, Liz, Betty, Susan, Sue, Suzi, James, Jim, Jimmy, Robert, Rob, Bob, Bobby.

And proper nouns can also be places.

And by this, we mean really the concrete instance of a place, such as Windsor Castle or the White House.

We can mean streets as in Downing Street or Wall Street.

Can mean towns and cities such as London, Washington or Peking.

Or we can mean countries such as England, America, China.

Or continents such as Africa, Europe or Asia.

Why stop there?

Let’s do planets as well.

Jupiter, Saturn, Venus or Mars.

All of these are examples of proper nouns.

Brands that are proper nouns: for instance Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Nike, Adidas and Puma, Mars, Nestlé and Kellogg’s, Metro, Tesco, Aldi, Wal-Mart.

Or titles are also proper nouns.

For instance, Doctor Brown.

Now we mean the person Dr. Brown not a doctor.

Or Mr. President, Captain Smith.

We mean the Captain Smith not a captain, or Lady Chatterley, or Lord Mountbatten.