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Noun   /naʊn/   Listen
Noun

noun
1.
A content word that can be used to refer to a person, place, thing, quality, or action.
2.
The word class that can serve as the subject or object of a verb, the object of a preposition, or in apposition.



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"Noun" Quotes from Famous Books



... that its head 'podesta' or 'power' should be the standard-bearer of justice; and its council or parliament composed of charitable men, or good men: "boni viri," in the sense from which the French formed their noun 'bonte.' ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... speciality of each deity and was very often the only thing known about him. In the course of time as the original name of the deity began to be thought of entirely as a proper name without any meaning, rather than as a common noun explaining the nature of the god to which it was attached, it became necessary to add to the original name some adjective which would adequately describe the god and do the work which the name by itself had originally done. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter

... unconscious of Billy's irony. She was one of the many millions who always accept the current humbug in whatever form he comes. Let us not, however, speak lightly of the humble humbug. Have you ever considered how empty this world would be without his cheering presence? You notice I give the noun "humbug" the masculine gender. The feminine members of our race have faults, but great, monumental, world-pervading humbugs are masculine, one and all, from the old-time witch doctor and Druid priest down to ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... of the nations of the New World. The tedious compilation of Father Garcia, Tratado del Origen de los Indios,* (* Treatise on the Origin of the Indians.) is a proof of this. The position of the possessive and personal pronouns at the end of the noun and the verb, as well as the numerous tenses of the latter, characterize the Hebrew and the other Semitic languages. Some of the missionaries were struck at finding the same peculiarities in the American tongues: they did not reflect, that the analogy of a few scattered features ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... carrying out of the divine purposes which we have already had to notice. They evidently contemplate only a temporary stay in the country. They say that they are come 'to sojourn'—the verb from which are formed the noun often rendered 'strangers,' and that which Jacob uses in verse 9, 'my pilgrimage.' The reason for their coming is given as the transient scarcity of pasturage in Canaan, which implies the intention of return as soon as that was altered. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... integration of the sentence. For example, let us take the words John, father, and love. John is the name of an individual; love is the name of a mental action, and father the name of a person. We put them together, John loves father, and they express a thought; John becomes a noun, and is the subject of the sentence; love becomes a verb, and is the predicant; father a noun, and is the object; and we now have an organized sentence. A sentence requires parts of speech, and parts of ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell

... yasimin. Sir R. F. Burton reads yamin and supposes it to be a copyist's error for yasmin, but this is a mistake; the word in the text is clearly yas, though the final s, being somewhat carelessly written in the Arabic MS, might easily be mistaken for mn with an undotted noun.] ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne

... number and construction of each noun and pronoun, and the mood, tense, voice and construction of each verb in the following sentence: If, in short, a writer sincerely wishes to communicate to another mind what is in his own mind, he will choose that ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... comes to us from the Greek (ta biblia, the books; that is, emphatically, the sacred canonical books) through the Latin and Norman French. In the ancient Greek and Latin churches, its use, as a plural noun applied to the whole collection of sacred books of the Old and New Testaments, can be traced as far back as the fifth century. In the English, as in all the modern languages of Europe, it has become a singular noun, and thus signifies THE BOOK—the one book ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... Latin does to Italian. It is more nearly related to modern Siamese than to modern ahan, but possesses many groups of consonants which have become simplified in both. It is a language of the isolating class, in which every word is a monosyllable, and may be employed either as a noun or as a verb according to its context and its position in a sentence. In the order of words, the genitive follows the norm it governs, and, as usual in such cases, the relations of time and place ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... given to specific parts of them, as the Law, the Prophets, or the Psalms. Our word Bible comes from a word which began to be applied to the sacred writings as a whole about four hundred years after Christ. It is a Greek plural noun, meaning the books, or the little books. These writings were called by this plural name for about eight hundred years; it was not till the thirteenth century that they began to be familiarly spoken of as a ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... pressed-cardboard "telescope" and wore a cane, though it hardly seemed cold enough for one. His language was that of a half-schooled man, with the paucity of vocabulary and the grammar of a ship's captain who had left school early but had since read much and lived more. Whenever a noun failed him, which was often, he filled in the blank with the word "proposition." Like myself, he traveled second-class because there ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... noun, and we cannot import into the adjective more than is contained in the noun. We may speak of the race of mankind as "humanity," and describe the existence of the race as "human life," but we should not be so absurd as to define "human" in ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... brown, that is, the German or Norway rats, were first brought over to this country in some timber, as is said; and being much stronger than the black, or till then, the common rats, they in many places quite extirpated the latter. The word, both the noun and the verb "to rat," was first levelled at the converts to the government of George the First, but has by degrees obtained a wider meaning, and come to be applied to any sudden and mercenary change in politics. The ravages ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... to use the adverb because an adverb enhances the verb and is active, whereas the adjective simply loads down the noun. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... said down in the primary room the other day," Bernice began in explanation. "The teacher asked him what 'cat' was. I guess he was not paying attention. He looked all around, and finally said he did not know. She told him it was a noun. 'Then,' he said, after some deliberation, 'kitten ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... verb "to trick""to dress" is derived probably from the noun, "trick" in the sense of 'a dexterous artifice,' ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... arise, as if I knew how to talk, but in a different manner from that practised by some ignorant persons, who interlard their conversation with Latin apophthegms, giving those who do not understand them to believe that they are great Latinists, whereas they can hardly decline a noun or conjugate ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... many games suitable for a rainy day; amongst them a poetry game, in which each player is provided with a slip of paper and a pencil. A circle is formed; every one writes a noun, and, folding down the line on which he has written, passes the paper to the next player, who writes a question on it. Each paper is then passed to the next person, who, unfolding it, has to make a short piece of poetry, not only introducing the noun ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various

... adjective. But it needs a new definition, and the complement of a corresponding noun. I would fain set down on paper some observations and reflections which may serve to make its meaning clear, and render due praise to that most excellent quality in man or woman,—especially in anglers,—the small ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... expressive the simple word can become in the hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr. Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in the Elegy can supply no more instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of the lark. Notice the exactness ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... pro'noun u'ni ty syn'the sis sub scribe' pro pel' u'ni form syl'la ble suf'fix pro duce' u'ni corn sym'pa thy sup press' pro vide' u'ni val ve syn tac'tic ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... Negro have been used interchangeably in the book, with Negro generally as a noun and black as an adjective. Aware of differing preferences in the black community for usage of these words, the author was interested in comments from early readers of the manuscript. Some of the participants in the story strongly ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... be observed that in many places I have capitalized the common noun Lake. Whenever this appears it signifies Lake Tahoe—the chief of all the lakes of ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... misapplied by most persons without reflection. But here is the power of Slavery. According to a curious tradition of the French language, Louis XIV., the Grand Monarch, by an accidental error of speech, among supple courtiers, changed the gender of a noun. But slavery does more. It changes word for word. It teaches men to say national instead of sectional, and sectional ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... edition, followed by Bentley; Mr. Johnson, the Hampshire and Winchester Editions give 'reflections.' But in Jane Austen's novels the expression 'a series of' is continually followed by a noun in the singular, when nowadays we should probably use the plural—e.g. Emma, chapter xxxvi, 'a series of dissipation'; Sense and Sensibility, chapter xxvii, 'a series of rain'; chapter xlvi, 'a ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

... Gauvon was going to reply, when happening to cast his eyes on me, he perceived I smiled without daring to say anything; he immediately ordered me to speak my opinion. I then said, I did not think the 't' superfluous, 'fiert' being an old French word, not derived from the noun 'ferus', proud, threatening; but from the verb 'ferit', he strikes, he wounds; the motto, therefore, did not appear to mean, some threat, but, 'Some strike who do not kill'. The whole company fixed their eyes on me, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... whole is made up of the following parts: the Letter (or ultimate element), the Syllable, the Conjunction, the Article, the Noun, the Verb, the Case, and the Speech. (1) The Letter is an indivisible sound of a particular kind, one that may become a factor in an intelligible sound. Indivisible sounds are uttered by the brutes also, but no one of these is a Letter in our sense of the term. These elementary sounds ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle

... philologists, even to those who have no agricultural knowledge, that the "fallow field" is not an idle field, though that is the popular notion. "Fallow" as a noun meant originally a "harrow," and as a verb, "to plough," "to harrow." "A fallow field is a field ploughed and tilled," but left unsown for a time as to the main crop of its productivity; or, in better modern ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... talk grammar instead, Diana. Pray give me your most careful attention. Yonder is a tree, which is a noun common; the tree is shady, which is an adjective qualifying the noun 'tree,' and casts its shade obliquely, which is an adverb governing the qualifying verb 'casts.'" Thus, as we walked, I proceeded to give her a definition of the various parts of speech with their relation ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... that the habit of striking bears as large as a horse with a school-slate was equally dangerous to the slate (which was also the property of Tuolumne County) and to the striker; and that the verb "to swot" and the noun substantive "snoot" were likewise indefensible, and not to be tolerated. Thus admonished Jimmy Snyder, albeit unshaken in his faith in his own ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... soliloquized he, is Rome. Many a day have I been kept in school without my dinner because I was not able to parse thee idly by, Roma—Rome—noun of the first declension, feminine gender, that a quarter of a century ago caused me punishment, I have thee now literally under foot, and (knocking his cigar) throw ashes ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... manufactured made its appearance. To this the name porcellane was given, and although the product was in reality simply a gres the fact is interesting because it is the first time that we have the word applied to china. It probably came from the Italian noun porcellana, meaning a shell, which the thinness of the new ware may have suggested; or the term may have been derived from the French word pourcelaine, a word used for any material from which a sculptor models his statues. We are not certain which of these ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett

... difficult to determine of what perception they partake; and in many instances our idea seems to be no other than of the sound or letters of the word, that stands for the collective tribe, of which we are said to have an abstracted idea, as noun, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... are all in it! This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is a kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men—you, I, Johnnie, Old Scully, and ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... word it is either conjunctive, Hamzat al-Wasl, or disjunctive, Hamzat al-Kat'. The difference is best illustrated by reference to the French so-called aspirated h, as compared with the above-mentioned silent h. If the latter, as initial of a noun, is preceded by the article, the article loses its vowel, and, ignoring the silent h altogether, is read with the following noun almost as one word: le homme becomes l'homme (pronounced lomme) as le ami becomes l'ami. This resembles very closely the Arabic Hamzah Wasl. If, on the other hand, a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... before him, carefully making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as "Riches are deceitful," and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof, during the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... in Paris cater to women; a large majority of the smart shops in London cater to men. It shows in their voices; for cities have voices just as individuals have voices. New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun—it's a verb transitive; but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York, like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries, hysterical babblings—a women's bridge-whist club at the hour of casting up the score; but London now is different. London ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... "It's not a noun, Constance, but an adjective, meaning sweet," translated Mary, laughing. She loved Constance's nonsense because it was never more than that. Stefan's absurdities were always personal and, often, not ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... is passing along a path. Again you cannot logically say that the passer is passing, for the sentence is redundant: the verb adds nothing to the noun and vice versa: but on the other hand you clearly cannot say that the non-passer is passing. Again if you say that the passer and the passing are identical, you overlook the distinction between the agent and the act and both become unreal. But you cannot maintain that the passer is different from ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... river Tees were unimportant. The oldest and most thoroughly Danish town was Grimsby. The settlements were generally small. I infer this from the extent to which the names are compounded of -by and a noun in the genitive case singular (Candel-s-by, Grim-s-by, &c.). Danish names such as Thorold, Thurkill, Orme, &c., are eminently common in Lincolnshire; and, at Grimsby, a vestige of the famous Danish hero Havelok is still preserved in Havelok-street. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... object (noun) people person pleasant, pleasantness, pleasing, pleasure pretty small thinking, thought, thoughts unnecessary unpleasant use, used, useful, usefulness, useless, uselessness, ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent

... assented to by both were uttered and received by eyes and not by mouth and ears? When the lady drank to the gentleman only with her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there no conversation because there was neither noun nor verb? Eyes are verbs, and glasses of wine are good nouns enough as between those who understand one another. Whether the ideas underlying them are expressed and conveyed by eyeage or by tonguage is a detail that ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... the derivation of the word Heygre in the Etymologists. The Keltic verb, Eigh, signifying, to cry, shout, sound, proclaim; or the noun Eigin, signifying difficulty, distress, force, violence—may, perhaps, be the root from whence came this name for the tide—so dissimilar to any other English word of kindred meaning. It is scarcely probable that the word by which the earliest inhabitants of Britain would express ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper

... persevers, discerns, occur respectively at pp. 43. and 92. of Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure (Percy Society's edition). The noun substantive perseverancediscernment is as common a word as any of the like length in the English language. To omit the examples that might be cited out of Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure, I will adduce a dozen other instances; and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various

... for a second during a lecture or sermon: we have, in common parlance, missed the hang of some detail or passage. What we have missed, in that lapse of attention, is a relation, the length and direction of a line, or the span of a musical interval, or, in the case of words, the references of noun and verb, the co-ordination of tenses of a verb. And it is such relations, more or less intricate and hierarchic, which transform what would otherwise be meaningless juxtapositions or sequences of sensations into the significant ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... from Greek and means "to write far"; so it is a very exact word, for to write far is precisely what we do when we send a telegram. The word today, used as a noun, denotes the system of wires with stations and operators and messengers, girdling the earth and reaching into every civilized community, whereby news is carried swiftly by electricity. But the word was coined long before it was discovered that intelligence could be communicated by electricity. ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... everyone looked at him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own dressing-room; they had ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... have no right to make any one else say words he did not say. If you leave out part of the passage, show the omission by dots; and in such a case, if you have to supply words of your own, as for example a noun in place of a pronoun, use square brackets, thus []. On the following page are examples of a convenient form ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... large volume might be easily collected of such cases as are of ordinary occurrence. Casuistry, the very word casuistry expresses the science which deals with such cases: for as a case, in the declension of a noun, means a falling away, or a deflection from the upright nominative (rectus), so a case in ethics implies some falling off, or deflection from the high road of catholic morality. Now, of all such cases, one, perhaps the most difficult to manage, the most ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... evidently intensely delighted. "I am so glad. I come avays to see 'er. Tell me," he continued, becoming suddenly serious, "'ave she 'ad 'er bart?" [The Signor almost sings his sentences. He went up the scale to the verb "'ad," and took a turn down again three notes to the noun "bart," which, by the way, was his way of ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand

... so successful in sticking the epithet "wanton" to Ganymede, that even Mr. Dyce, with his clear sight, did not see that the very word he wanted was the next word before him. It puts one in mind of a man looking for his spectacles who has them already across his nose. "Wanton" is a noun as well as an adjective; and, to prevent it from being mistaken for an epithet applied to Ganymede, it will in future be necessary to place after it a comma, when the passage will ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various

... The noun brosier, as Mr. Wilbraham indicates, seems to be derived from the old word brose, or, as we now say, bruise. A brosier would therefore mean a broken-down man, and therefore a bankrupt. The verb ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various

... accusativus, sc. casus, a translation of the Gr. aitiatike ptosis, the case concerned with cause and effect, from aiti'a, a cause), in grammar, a case of the noun, denoting primarily the object of verbal action or the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... even when one is said to humble himself, he either has or affects to have humility of heart. To disgrace may be to bring or inflict odium upon others, but the word is chiefly and increasingly applied to such moral odium as one by his own acts brings upon himself; the noun disgrace retains more of the passive sense than the verb; he disgraced himself by his conduct; he brought disgrace upon his family. To dishonor a person is to deprive him of honor that should or might be given. To discredit ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... certain kings hyku-Shausu; other passages, or, the same passages wrongly interpreted, were applied to the race, and were rendered hyku-Shausu "the prisoners taken from the Shausu," a substantive derived from the root haka "to take" being substituted for the noun hyqu "prince." Josephus declares, on the authority of Manetho, that some manuscripts actually suggested this derivation—a fact which is easily explained by the custom of the Egyptian record offices. I may mention, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... plural of a noun or adjective, the rule appears to be to add le as a postfix, sometimes previously supplying a terminal vowel if required: Example: geta hand becomes getale in the plural: kuku foot, kukule: kutai yam, kutaile: ipi wife, ipile: kerne lad ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... their former existence; for the Ottawas and Chippewas named this little island "Mi-shi-ne-macki-nong" for memorial sake of those their former confederates, which word is the locative case of the Indian noun "Michinemackinawgo." Therefore, we contend, this is properly where the name ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird

... now is but vacancy. It is blessed to think of the recognising of lost and loved ones. But all these blessednesses, heaped together, as it seems to me, would become sickeningly the same if prolonged through eternity, unless we had God for our very own. Eternal is an awful word, even when the noun that goes with it is blessedness. And I know not how even the redeemed could be saved, as the long ages rolled on, from the oppression of monotony, and the feeling, 'I would not live always,' unless God was 'the strength of their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... in this alternative assumes a governing power of the universe, and that it acts by directing its power towards these chief objects, or making its special, proper motion towards them. And here he uses the noun ([Greek: horme]) "movement," which contains the same notion as the verb ([Greek: ormese]) "moved," which he used at the beginning of the paragraph, when he was speaking of the making of the universe. If we do not accept the first hypothesis, he says, we must take the conclusion of ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

... noun of course had referred merely to that small, high-bred, cosmopolitan class which presents types like Eleanor Burgoyne. And here came this girl, walking through his dream, to remind him of what 'woman,' average virtuous woman of the New or the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... or him who has sprouted forth from the Lord, i.e., the Son of God. Against the latter interpretation it is objected by Hoffmann (Weissagung und Erfuellung. Th. 1, S. 214): "[Hebrew: cmH] is an intransitive verb, so that [Hebrew: cmH] may be as well connected with a noun which says, who causes to sprout forth, as with one which says, whence the thing sprouts forth. Now it is quite obvious that, in the passage before us, the former case applies, and not the latter, inasmuch as one cannot say that something, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... sent me to school, but I looked at the master, and saw that he was a smooth round ferule, or an improper noun, or a vulgar fraction, and refused to obey him. Or he was a piece of string, a rag, a willow-wand, and I had a contemptuous pity. But one was a well of cool, deep water, and looking suddenly in, one ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... Nationality: noun: Wallisian(s), Futunan(s), or Wallis and Futuna Islanders adjective: Wallisian, Futunan, or Wallis and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... which we had written down from Barber's statements seemed at all familiar to their ears; but Mr. White obtained a vocabulary which showed that their language was nearly the same as that of the aborigines at Wallamoul; the only difference being the addition of na to each noun, as namil for mil, the ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... required to come forward and touch it. The teacher then asks the question, writing it upon the blackboard or spelling it upon his fingers, "What did John do?" Answer, "He touched the pitcher." A change from a boy to a girl brings out another pronoun; a change of objects, another noun; a change of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various

... myself as a witness I take the stand once more to confess that Alan Seeger's lofty lyric, 'I have a rendezvous with Death' has a diminished appeal because of the foreign connotations of 'rendezvous'. The French noun was adopted into English more than three centuries ago; and it was used as a verb nearly three centuries ago; it does not interfere with the current of sympathy when I find it in the prose of Scott and of Mark Twain. Nevertheless, it appears ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English

... a sound that consists from the loungs." "A participle is a form of a verb partaking of the nature of an adjective or a noun and expressing action or human being as ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 6, June, 1889 • Various

... word forms the plural, which is never formed in any other way. The first three vowels (a, e, i) added to any noun, form respectively its genitive, dative, and accusative; s added to these forms makes the plurals of the same cases. Man is therefore ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... question the intellectual ability of the blacks because they have not elaborate systems of numeration and notation, which in their life were quite unneeded. Such as were needed were supplied. They are often incorporate in one word-noun and qualifying ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... and are denoted by prefixes. The declension of the noun lum (hill) is given below by way ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... said there was analogy between 'em; She proved it somehow out of sacred song, But I must leave the proofs to those who've seen 'em; But this I heard her say, and can't be wrong, And all may think which way their judgments lean 'em, "'T is strange—the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,' The English always use ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... language. All progress in knowledge and acquisition of new ideas is reflected in language by an increase of words. But an examination of words in common use will show that they are nearly all the names of concepts. Proper names are the principal exception. Every common noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition is the name of a concept; for example, horse, beauty, to steal, running, over, early, yellow, grape, ocean, etc. To understand these concepts there must be somewhere a progress from the individual to the abstract, an induction from particulars ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry

... also use the term "cut" in a butcher shop, but when travelling in a hill country and looking out of the train window it meant the mountain cut. They said they never heard of the word sod, except used as a noun. She replied that she never heard the word "turf" used as a verb. We continued in an amiable wrangle which finally brought out the fact which even the most obstinate of them was obliged to admit, and that is that when traced to its proper root, the ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... like most men of that day, he used capitals and omitted them with an apparent carelessness. In the above note, for example, the following words occur, "Great charter." Here he furnishes the adjective with a capital, and reduces his noun to the insignificance of ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton

... instrument of production," they say. That is true. But when, changing the noun into an adjective, they alter the phrase, thus, "The land is a productive instrument," ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... repytation was spotless. His age entitled him to the Fifth Reader class, but he was still spellin' out words in the Third; fractions was only a dream to him, and he couldn't 'a' told you the difference between a noun and a wild carrot. But through it all he'd been so humble and polite that Leander looked on him as ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd

... "Then you won't close?" said the man. "By no means," I replied, "your proposal does not suit me." "You may be principal in time," said the man. "That makes no difference," said I; and, sitting with my legs over the pit, I forthwith began to decline an Armenian noun. "That a'n't cant," said the man; "no, nor gypsy either. Well, if you won't close, another will, I can't lose any more time," and forthwith ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... pressure or oppression (priemere, hod. premere, to press or oppress, indicative used as a noun). The monk of course refers to the posture in which he had seen the abbot have to do with the girl, pretending to believe that he placed her on his own breast (instead of mounting on hers) out of a sentiment of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... at least is the generally received rendering. Ackermann, following Buelg's probably spurious text, disputes that this is the exact meaning of the noun.] ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell

... bring Nosey to the gallows, was a favoured animal on Austin's station at the Barwon. It was a privilege to shoot him—in small quantities—he was so precious. But he soon became, as the grammar says, a noun of multitude. He swarmed on the plains, hopped over the hills, burrowed among the rocks in the Rises, and nursed his multitudinous progeny in every hollow log of the forest. Neither mountain, lake, or river ever barred his passage. He ate ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale

... forgotten, spoken, frozen, ridden. 3. It does not appear that any confusion would follow the indiscriminate use of the same word for the past tense and the participle passive, since the auxiliary verb have, or the preceding noun or pronoun always clearly distinguishes them: and lastly, rhime-poetry must lose the use of many elegant words ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... was called Goswhit, a name that is evidently a translation of some Welsh term meaning "goosewhite," which at once classes the helmet with Arthur's dazzlingly bright fairy belongings. Moreover, Layamon says (vs. 21158, 23779 ff.) that his spear Ron (a Welsh common noun, meaning "spear") was made by a smith called Griffin, whose name may be the result of an English substitution of the familiar word griffin for the unfamiliar Gofan, the name of the Celtic smith-god. These facts are mainly important as testimony to the Celtic element in Arthurian romance, ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace

... particles, as perseveringly as any professor could have desired. But the dreadful part of the lessons to Hitty was the recitation after tea; no matter how well she knew every inflection of a verb, every termination of a noun, her father's cold, gray eye, fixed on her for an answer, dispelled all kinds of knowledge, and, for at least a week, every lesson ended in tears. However, there are alleviations to everything in life; and when the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... veritable and inimitable clown, and his name has figured in French literature both as a proper and a common noun almost from the day that he and his partner, Mondor, set up their booth on the Pont Neuf. They began their sale of ointments and liniments in Paris about the year 1618, attracting custom by their absurd dialogues in the vein of the circus-clown and ring-master of to-day. Occasionally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... primitive conceptions and ideas. Some traces of the earliest form of language can still be discerned. Thus of Santali Sir G. Grierson states: "Every word can perform the function of a verb, and every verbal form can, according to circumstances, be considered as a noun, an adjective or a verb. It is often simply a matter of convenience which word is considered as a noun and which as an adjective ... Strictly speaking, in Santali there is no real verb as distinct from the other classes of words. Every independent word can perform ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... F, l, and s at the end of a monosyllable after a single vowel are commonly doubled. The exceptions are the cases in which s forms the plural or possessive case of a noun, or third person singular of the verb, and the following words: clef, if, of, pal, sol, as, gas, has, was, yes, gris, his, is, thus, us. L is not doubled at the end of words of more than one syllable, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... rate. This discovery, however, won't signify, for I know Dunroe. The poor fool has no self-reliance; but if left to himself would die. He possesses no manly spirit of independent will, no firmness, no fixed principle—he is, in fact, a noun adjective, and cannot stand alone. Depraved in his appetites and habits of life, he cannot live without some hanger-on to enjoy his freaks of silly and senseless profligacy, who can praise and laugh at him, and who will act at once as his butt, his bully, his pander, and his friend; four ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... instance, the verb means only the word, or the principal word in a sentence; a child can easily learn this after he has learnt what is meant by a sentence; but it would be extremely difficult to make him comprehend it before he could distinguish a verb from a noun, and before he had any idea of the structure of a common sentence. From easy, we should proceed to more complicated, sentences. The grammatical construction of the following lines, for example, may not be ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... which Shakspeare sometimes uses, delighted may mean delightful in the former sense; perhaps, rather, filled with delight. The word then would be formed directly from the noun, and must not be regarded as a participle at all, but rather an ellipsis, from which the verb (which may be represented by give, fill, endow, &c.) is omitted. Take, as an instance, this ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various

... myself can noun substantive stand, Impose on my Owners, and save my own land; You call me masculine, feminine, neuter, or block, Be what will the gender, sirs, hic, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... "Smellie—Very common noun, absurd person, singular back number, tutor gender, objectionable case governed by the word I," ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... "This is the truth" than "This is the truthful result." Of course an adjective may be absolutely necessary. But you may often detect extempore speakers in piling in adjectives, because they have not yet hit on the right noun. In writing, this is not to be excused. "You have all the time there is," when you write, and you do better to sink a minute in thinking for one right word, than to put in two in its place,—because you can ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale

... found the inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another man who could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous and the grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable fashion? Who could delight you with his noun and disgust you with his verb, thrill you with his adjective and chill you with his adverb, make you run the whole gamut of human emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that miserable cottage at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream palaces beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... and read and reread the labels, one was struck by the meagre English of merchandisers and the poor verbal resources of commerce generally. A while ago business dealt hardly with the word "proposition." It was the universal noun. Everything that business touched, however remotely, was a "proposition." When last he was "outside" the writer heard the Nicene creed described as a "tough proposition"; the Vice-President of the United States as a "cold-blooded proposition," ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck

... my father is not agriculturist, nor working class; he is of the Kayeth caste; but he had not the advantage of a collegiate education, and he does not know much of the Congress. It is a movement for the educated young-man" -connecting adjective and noun in a ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... he says, 1st October 1883, "is literally translating each noun (in the long lists which so often occur) in its turn, so that the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... Yegor went on writing, "in volume five of the Army Regulations soldier is a common noun and a proper one, a soldier of the first rank is called a general, and ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... would have thought of "departed" before he thought of "joys." A very little consideration of the actual processes of thought in such a case, will show the truth of our observation, and the instinctive wisdom of the older song-writers, in putting the epithet as often as possible after the noun, instead of before it, even at the expense of grammar. They are bad things at all times in song poetry, these epithets; and, accordingly, we find that the best German writers, like Uhland and Heine, get rid of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... "fag" that is turned down, Though that often proves a rasper Upon the larynx; here the noun ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various

... love is an active verb and woman's a passive noun. He loves and she is loved; he asks questions and ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... indiscreet is an epithet; and even were it a noun substantive, as a name must be, it could only be one name." It was certainly very hard to fall in love with a man who could talk about epithets so very soon after his marriage; but yet she would go on trying. "Dear George," she said, "don't you scold me. I will do anything you tell me, but I ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... up?—When she's a north wind. When she's a Roman emperor. When she's an iceberg. When she's a brass tiger.—There! that'll do. Good-bye, mother, for the present! I mayn't know much, as she's always telling me, but I do know that a noun is not a thing, nor ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea, because by reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute you see it. You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out of it. German names ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... is a kind of music for me. It was almost a pleasure to write that letter, because of the repetition of that delightful noun. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... literal acceptation means to beat out grain from the sheaf on the thrashing-floor: hence, as the corn is thus scattered, it came to signify to scatter, or to be liberal; and thence, finally, to offer willingly and freely. The noun ([Hebrew: neder]) accordingly is put to denote the act of offering, or of making a promise, to God, and also what in this is spontaneously offered or promised. Moreover, in a passage formerly quoted, it is described as a free-will-offering. The vow is sometimes made in a spontaneous effusion of ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... I must object to in your little book, and it recurs more than once—FADELESS is no genuine compound; loveless is, because love is a noun as well as verb, but what is a fade?—and I do not quite like whipping the Greek drama upon the back of "Genesis," page 8. I do not like praise handed in by disparagement: as I objected to a side censure on Byron, etc., in the lines on Bloomfield: with these ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... not be amiss to observe that the original term is gwyddfa but gwyddfa; being a feminine noun or compound commencing with g, which is a mutable consonant, loses the initial letter before y the definite article—you say Gwyddfa a tumulus, but not y gwyddfa ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... as often as kullu-ma. This is the eleventh question of the twelve in Al-Hariri, Ass. xxiv., and the sixth of Ass. xxxvi. The former runs, "What is the noun (kullu- ma) which gives no sense except by the addition thereto of two words, or the shortening thereof to two letters (i.e. ma); and in the first case there is adhesion and in the second compulsion?" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... signifying the same thing; but where is the resemblance between dzow and tide? Again, the word for bread in ancient Armenian is hats; yet the Armenian on London Bridge is made to say zhats, which is not the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, but the accusative. Now, critics, ravening against a man because he is a gentleman and a scholar, and has not only the power but also the courage to write original works, why did not you discover that weak point? ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... article in the room was successively pointed out to Newton, and he was obliged to repeat the name; and afterwards the articles of their dress were resorted to, much to his amusement. Then there was a dead stand:—the fact is, that there is no talking with noun ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... the aorist infinitive after a verb of saying can bear a future sense. The aorist infinitive after [Greek] (ii.280, vii.76) is hardly an argument in its favour; the infinitive there is in fact a noun in ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.

... my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... shall we say, because Elohim and Jehovah are sometimes interchanged in the text? Can they believe that any Jew, who could concoct a book like Genesis, did not also know that Elohim was a plural noun? Can they any more, then, believe that a Celtic man with brains enough to fabricate poems like Fingal and Temora did not know that the Gaelic name for the sun was feminine? Can they see no other way of accounting for such alleged variations of gender, and number, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various

... unassisted noun, scorning the aid of verb, adjective, or adverb, the gooseherd, by a masterpiece of profound and subtle emphasis, contrived to express the fact that he existed in a world of dead illusions, that he had become a convert to Schopenhauer, and that Mr. Curtenty's inapposite geniality ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett



Words linked to "Noun" :   count noun, open-class word, declension, proper name, noun phrase, major form class, content word, substantive



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