Concrete/Abstract Nouns
From TEFL World Wiki
Nouns are words used to name objects, concepts, ideas, things and so on. We can classify nouns in different ways including Concrete and Abstract.
Whether a noun is concrete or abstract depends on whether we can sense it using our 5 main senses. With a concrete noun we can do one or more of the following:
- see it
- hear it
- smell it
- touch it
- taste it
If we can't do any of those five things with a noun it is known as an abstract noun.
For example, take a look at the following sentence where the nouns are highlighted.
Eric walked to the shop and bought some bread and water.
All the nouns can be sensed in some way. However, in this next example some of the nouns cannot be sensed in the usual way:
Love is like a rose; it has beauty but, if handled wrongly, causes pain.
Only rose is a concrete noun which can be sensed; the other nouns have no colour, taste, smell, touch or sound.
