Noun

== History <span id="Substantive as a word for noun"></span>==
{{hatnote|See also [[Part of speech#History|History of parts of speech]]}}
[[Word class]]es (parts of speech) were described by [[Sanskrit]] grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In [[Yāska]]'s ''[[Nirukta]]'', the noun (''nāma'') is one of the four main categories of words defined.<ref name=Matilal>[[Bimal Krishna Matilal]], ''The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language'', 1990 (Chapter 3)</ref>

The [[Ancient Greek]] equivalent was ''ónoma'' (ὄνομα), referred to by [[Plato]] in the [[Cratylus (dialogue)|''Cratylus'' dialog]], and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in ''[[The Art of Grammar]]'', attributed to [[Dionysius Thrax]] (2nd century BC). The term used in [[Latin grammar]] was ''nōmen''. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name".<ref>{{L&S|nomen|nōmen|ref}}; {{LSJ|o/noma|ὄνομα|ref}}</ref> The English word ''noun'' is derived from the Latin term, through the [[Anglo-Norman language|Anglo-Norman]] ''nom'' (other forms include ''nomme'', and ''noun'' itself).

The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical [[morphology (linguistics)|forms]] that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by [[grammatical gender|gender]] and inflected for [[grammatical case|case]] and [[grammatical number|number]]. Because [[adjective]]s share these three [[grammatical category|grammatical categories]], adjectives  typically were placed in the same class as nouns.

Similarly, the Latin term ''nōmen'' includes both nouns (substantives) and adjectives, as originally did the English word ''noun'', the two types being distinguished as ''nouns substantive'' and ''nouns adjective'' (or ''substantive nouns'' and ''adjective nouns'', or simply ''substantives'' and ''adjectives''). (The word ''[[nominal (linguistics)|nominal]]'' is now sometimes used to denote a class that includes both nouns and adjectives.)

Many European languages use a [[cognate]] of the word ''substantive'' as the basic term for ''noun'' (for example, Spanish ''sustantivo'', "noun"). Nouns in the dictionaries of such languages are demarked by the abbreviation ''s.'' or ''sb.'' instead of ''n.'', which may be used for proper nouns or neuter nouns instead. In English, some modern authors use the word ''substantive'' to refer to a class that includes both nouns (single words) and [[noun phrase]]s (multiword units that are sometimes called ''noun equivalents'').<ref name="CMOS">{{Citation |author = Chicago Manual of Style |author-link = The Chicago Manual of Style |title = The Chicago Manual of Style |section = 5.10: Noun-equivalents and substantives |publisher = [[University of Chicago Press]] |url=http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch05/ch05_sec010.html |postscript=.}}</ref> It can also be used as a counterpart to ''attributive'' when distinguishing between a noun being used as the [[head (linguistics)|head]] (main word) of a noun phrase and a noun being used as a [[noun adjunct]]. For example, the noun ''knee'' can be said to be used substantively in ''my knee hurts'', but attributively in ''the patient needed knee replacement''.