Category Archives: Parts of Speech – Nouns

Commonly confused words: practice and practise (and licence and license and even more)

English spelling is tricky: that is something most people agree on. There are a couple of pairs of words that a particularly troublesome for a lot of people: practice and practise, and licence and license. Prophecy and prophesy follow the same rules, but as prophesy in particular isn’t commonly used (prophesise seems to have taken

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Adjectives, nouns and adjectival nouns (part 2): to use apostrophes or not to use apostrophes?

I have looked at this question in my blog on Possessive apostrophes: when do you need them? but it is worth looking at in more detail, as it is one of the trickier areas of grammar. It is also one where the answer is sometimes not clear, but can either be illogical or even open

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Verbs as Nouns: participles and gerunds—grammatical chameleons

Verbs as nouns Some words are like amphibious vehicles that can be both a boat and a truck: the same basic word form is equally at home behaving in very different ways One of the confusing aspects of English is that the same word can act as different parts of speech, or change the function

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Nouns: mass and count, and the less–fewer issue

Mass or count? In this stunning photograph, we use two nouns to describe what we can see: we see two penguins on ice. And these two nouns demonstrate the final way nouns can be divided: into count nouns and mass nouns.  Count nouns are also sometimes called unit nouns (in that unhelpful way in English

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Nouns: abstract and concrete nouns, and waffly writing

Abstract or concrete? Making your writing clearer Another useful way to divide nouns is to separate them into the categories of abstract and concrete. This does not stop them being proper or common; it is simply another way to look at them. This means that proper nouns can also be abstract or concrete, and common

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Nouns: Proper nouns and common nouns – and capital letters

Proper or common? Of queens, receptionists and capital letters One useful way to split up the infinite number of nouns is to divide them into common and proper nouns. It is a useful division, because proper nouns are a very strange group of nouns: in several ways, they have quite different characteristics from all other

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