What would you call a noun which lives at the very bottom of a hierarchy of common/proper nouns?
For example, say we have the proper noun "Regent Street".
The common noun is "Street", which is a name we give (among many others eg. "Avenue", "Road") to a thoroughfare.
But what kind of noun is "thoroughfare"? Root noun? Perhaps I'm thinking of this with too much of an engineers head 🙂
Would thoroughfare in this case qualify as an abstract noun?
Another example:
- Proper Noun – "Ford Mondeo"
- Common Noun – "Car" (among Van, Lorry, Motorcycle etc)
- Abstract(?) Noun – "Vehicle"
Best Answer
Abstract nouns refer to abstract things, concrete nouns to concrete things. ‘Table’, for example, is concrete. It’s something we can touch and bump into. ‘Thoughtfulness’, on the other hand, is not something we can touch and bump into. It’s abstract.
Proper nouns describe things or people that are unique, such as ‘Africa’, ‘Madonna’ or ‘Piccadilly’. By contrast, there are several continents, singers and streets, so ‘continent’, ‘singer and ‘street’ are common nouns.
‘Thoroughfare’ is a concrete common noun. We may not be able to touch it and bump into it in the same way we can touch and bump into a table, but it is clearly something which exists in the world outside our own minds. It's a common noun because there are lots of them. It is also a countable noun, but perhaps we should save that for another time.