Grammar: Word classes: Nouns

Other types of nouns

Classifying nouns according to meaning

It is possible to classify nouns according to their meaning and how they are used in English, but it is a truly enormous task. Roget's Thesaurus presents one such classification. For more information, see http://www.thesaurus.com/

Here is a very general classification of concepts in English, all of them having a common noun to name them:

This classification is one way of sorting nouns into different classes of meaning, exploring how the vocabulary of the language is organised. For example, masculine and feminine forms (man - woman, stallion - mare, bull - cow), indication of age (baby - child - teenager - adult, puppy - dog, chick - hen), family relationships (mother - daughter - sister - cousin). 

Note also that in English the class of nouns referring to farm animals allows us to distinguish between the live animal and the animal as food (pig - pork, cow - beef, sheep - mutton). This is a result of the various influences that other languages have had on English. In this case for example, the words denoting live animals tend to derive from Germanic origins and the words denoting different types of meat from French origins.

This classification is useful from both a lexical and grammatical point of view, because it allows us to see how different types of nouns are associated with choices in vocabulary and with particular grammatical patterns.