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A noun is the name of anything: man, woman, England, apple, Manchester United.

There are four kinds of noun in English:

1 Common nouns, which are names that are not specific to particular people or things. They begin with a lower-case letter: writer, newspaper, mountain.

2 Proper nouns, which are the names of specific people, places or occasions and which begin with a capital letter: Charles Dickens, The Times, Mount Everest.

3 Abstract nouns, which are the names of qualities, states or activities: laughter, beauty, love.

4 Collective nouns, which are names for a group or collection of similar things: crowd, team, army.

Most plurals of nouns end in an s. There are, however, a number of exceptions.

1 Nouns ending in o, ch, sh, ss or x form their plural by adding es: tomato, tomatoes; box, boxes.

2 Nouns ending in y following a consonant drop the y and add ies: fly, flies; baby, babies.

3 Some nouns ending in f or fe drop the f and add ves: wife, wives; loaf, loaves. (But some do not: roof, roofs.)

4 Some foreign words which retain their original Greek or Latin forms retain their original plural forms:

Latin: axis, axes; medium, media; stratum, strata.

Greek: crisis, crises; basis, bases; criterion, criteria.