concrete noun

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Related to concrete noun: collective noun, mass noun

concrete nouns vs. abstract nouns

All nouns serve to name a person, place, or thing. Depending on whether they name a tangible or an intangible thing, nouns are classed as being either concrete or abstract.

Concrete nouns name people, places, animals, or things that are or were physically tangible—that is, they can or could be seen or touched, or have some physical properties.

Abstract nouns, as their name implies, name intangible things, such as concepts, ideas, feelings, characteristics, attributes, etc.—you cannot see or touch these kinds of things.

concrete noun

(Grammar) a noun that refers to a material object, as for example horse. Compare abstract noun

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

con′crete noun′

a noun denoting something material and nonabstract, as chair, house, or automobile. Compare abstract noun.

Translations

Konkretum

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References in periodicals archive ?

Now democracy is not a concrete noun - it is an abstract noun, therefore, there is no one definitive definition.

The Government's job is to govern

Concrete noun phrases continue through the poem by describing what body parts the sack covers: your head, your torso, your knees, and your face.

How to Build a Metaphor: Novel Metaphors Construed by Concrete Elements in Tomas Transtromer's Poetry

He faults Strunk at only one point--for "equating good with manly" in the sentence, "The first virtue, the touchstone of masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun." Not very manly of you Mark, to smack down a long-dead writer for failing to abide by today's gender shibboleths.

What are words worth?

Abstraction rules; this reviewer longed for the reassurance of a concrete noun.

Bliss, Jane, Naming & Namelessness in Medieval Romance

If you want the name to reflect the nature of your business, it is highly memorable to connect a concrete noun to a simple business description: for example, Crown Windscreens.

What's in a name?

The students connected an abstract noun with a concrete noun and developed an extended metaphor.

Art and poetry, surrealistically speaking

While the complexity of Callery's working method is difficult to read in the finished result, it serves to remind us that 'painting' is an abstract as well as a concrete noun. The tension between the arrested physical activity of painting and the static object has been a key theme in the history of modernism.

Culture: Prize efforts present sorry picture of art; This year's Jerwood Prize shortlist left Terry Grimley far from impressed

There are three examples where that occurs with a concrete noun: money, slum, and man.

THE EMERGENCE OF TEXTURE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE FUNCTIONS OF THE NOMINAL DEMONSTRATIVES IN AN ENGLISH INTERLANGUAGE CORPUS

Zwingli's account agrees that no concrete noun can be nature-neutral.

Alloiosis in the Christology of Zwingli

Grab readers with a concrete noun and yank hard with a strong, transitive verb.

First things first

And for him, 'Great Britain' is one thing, a sort of concrete noun.

Not so great Britain

The simplest possible skeleton will therefore be something like those in (11) for the concrete noun chair, the adjective happy, or the intransitive verb snore: (11) chair [+material([ ])] happy [-dynamic ([ ])] snore [+dynamic ([ ])]