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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

noun.

A word that functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as person, animal, place, word, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality, or idea: one of the basic parts of speech in many languages, including English.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/naʊn/UK, US/nɒ(ʊ)n/Multicultural-London-English/nʌʊn/Canada, dialectal[nəu̯n]Canada, dialectal
  1. A word that functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as person, animal, place, word, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality, or idea: one of the basic parts of speech in many languages, including English.

  2. Either a word that can be used to refer to a person, animal, place, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality or idea, or a word that modifies or describes a previous word or its referent; a substantive or adjective, sometimes also including other parts of speech such as numeral or pronoun.

    archaic · broadly
  3. An object within a user interface to which a certain action or transformation (i.e., verb) is applied.

Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁nómn̥ Proto-Italic *nōmn̥ Latin nōmen Anglo-Norman noun, non, nombor. Middle English noun English noun Inherited from Middle English noun, from Anglo-Norman noun, non, nom, from Latin nōmen (“name; noun”). The grammatical sense in Latin was a semantic loan from Koine Greek ὄνομα (ónoma). Doublet of name and nomen.

verb/naʊn/UK, US/nɒ(ʊ)n/Multicultural-London-English/nʌʊn/Canada, dialectal[nəu̯n]Canada, dialectal
  1. To convert a word to a noun.

    transitive
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁nómn̥ Proto-Italic *nōmn̥ Latin nōmen Anglo-Norman noun, non, nombor. Middle English noun English noun Inherited from Middle English noun, from Anglo-Norman noun, non, nom, from Latin nōmen (“name; noun”). The grammatical sense in Latin was a semantic loan from Koine Greek ὄνομα (ónoma). Doublet of name and nomen.

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noun studionoun workshello, noun

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.