Proper noun

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Common and proper nouns[edit]

In linguistics proper nouns, common nouns and mass nouns are three distinct subclasses of nouns. Common nouns refer to a class of individual entities, whereas proper nouns name a unique referent, and mass nouns refer to non-individual referents. In English syntax they can fulfill the same functions, but proper nouns behave different in that, like mass nouns, they cannot take the determiners "the" or "a" - this is a consequence of the fact that since they denote a unique referent they cannot be indefinite, and they do not have a plural form except in special cases where they are used as common nouns.

Acquisition and cognition[edit]

There is evidence that language learners learn and store proper nouns differently from common nouns, and that neurolinguistic disorders such as aphasia affect them differentially. For example Japanese language learners, whose language does not distinguish overtly between common and proper nouns, two year old children distinguished between common and proper noun depending on the type of referent, and their existing knowledge of the type of referent. When the referent was an animal or person they assumed the noun used to refer to them to be a proper noun.[3] Similarly in English children employ different strategies depending on the type of referent, but also rely on syntactic cues, such as the presence or absence of the determiner "the" to differentiate between common and proper nouns when first learned.[4]

Proper names[edit]

Current linguistics makes a distinction between proper nouns and proper names;[5] but this distinction is not universally observed,[6] and sometimes it is observed but not rigorously.[7] When the distinction is made, proper nouns are limited to single words only (possibly with the), while proper names include all proper nouns (in their primary applications) as well as noun phrases such as United Kingdom, North Carolina, Royal Air Force, and the White House.[8] United Kingdom, for example, is a proper name with the common noun kingdom as its head, and North Carolina is headed by the proper noun Carolina. Especially as titles of works, but also as nicknames and the like, some proper names contain no noun and are not formed as noun phrases (the film Being There; Hi De Ho as a nickname for Cab Calloway and as the title of a film about him).

Though the term common name is not much used in this context, it would mean a noun (or a noun phrase) that is not a proper name (Swiss cheese, and the common noun bluebird, are both common names in this sense).[9] Sometimes proper names are called simply names; but that term is often used more broadly (as in "chair is the name for something we sit on").


[common-noun senses throughout]
  • Sanjay lives on the beach road.
[the road that runs along the beach]
  • Sanjay lives on Beach Road.
  • My university has a school of medicine.




In languages that use alphabetic scripts and that distinguish lower and upper case, there is usually an association between proper names and capitalization. (A prominent exception is German, in which all nouns are capitalized.) The details are complex, and vary sharply from language to language: for proper names, as for several other kinds of words and phrases. For example, expressions for days of the week and months of the year are capitalized in English, but not in Spanish, French, Swedish, or Finnish, though they may be understood as proper names in all of these. Languages differ in whether most elements of multiword proper names are capitalized (American English has House of Representatives, in which lexical words are capitalized) or only the initial element (as in Slovenian Državni zbor, "National Assembly"). In Czech, multiword settlement names are capitalized throughout, but non-settlement names are only capitalized in the initial element, though with many exceptions.

English capitalization of proper nouns[edit]

Modern standardization and exceptions[edit]







Historical variation[edit]



Brand names[edit]



Alternative marking of proper names[edit]

In non-alphabetic scripts proper names are sometimes marked by other means. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, parts of a royal name were enclosed in a cartouche: an oval with a horizontal line at one end.[17] In Chinese script, a proper name mark (a kind of underline) has sometimes been used to indicate a proper name. In the standard Pinyin system of romanization for Mandarin Chinese, capitalization is used to mark proper names,[18] with some complexities because of different Chinese classifications of nominal types,[19] and even different notions of such broad categories as word and phrase.[20]


See also[edit]


  1. ^ Lester and Beason (2005), p. 4; Anderson (2007), pp. 3–5.
  2. ^ Valentine et al. (1996), pp. 2–5; Anderson (2007), p. 3.
  3. ^ Imai, M. and Haryu, E. (2001), Learning Proper Nouns and Common Nouns without Clues from Syntax. Child Development, 72: 787–802. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00315
  4. ^ Katz, N., Baker, E., & Macnamara, J. (1974). What's in a name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. Child development, 469-473.
  5. ^ The distinction is recognized in the OED entry "proper, adj., n., and adv." The relevant lemmas within the entry: "proper noun n. Grammar a noun that designates an individual person, place, organization, animal, ship, etc., and is usually written with an initial capital letter; cf. proper name n. ..."; "proper name n. ... a name, consisting of a proper noun or noun phrase including a proper noun, that designates an individual person, place, organization, tame animal, ship, etc., and is usually written with an initial capital letter. ...". See also Aarts (2011), pp. 42, 57; and Huddleston and Pullum (2002), pp. 515–522. Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Grammar (see References) is the major application of current linguistic theory to English grammar. Its acceptance is high among academic linguists. Burridge (2002) reviews it as "one of the most superb works of academic scholarship ever to appear on the English linguistics scene", and points out that the editors "are leading authorities in this field; so too are their thirteen co-authors" (p. 63). She finds in this grammar "much more in the way of syntactic argumentation than normally appears in a grammar book", and concludes that it offers "the most outstanding account of present-day English grammar that is available" (p. 64). Huddleston and Pullum consistently apply the accepted modern distinction between nouns as a class of single words and noun phrases (NPs) as a class of larger structural elements, typically with nouns as their head (Chapter 5, "Nouns and noun phrases", pp. 326–328 et passim). In a subsection (20.1) of Chapter 5, headed "The distinction between proper names and proper nouns", the authors write: "In their primary use proper names normally refer to the particular entities that they name: in this use they have the syntactic status of NPs. ...Proper nouns, by contrast, are word-level units belonging to the category noun. ... Proper nouns are nouns which are specialised to the function of heading proper names" (p. 516). The distinction is maintained throughout the subsequent analysis.
  6. ^ Chalker (1992), p. 813.
  8. ^ Huddleston and Pullum (2002), p. 516. The authors give as an example the proper name New Zealand, which includes the proper noun Zealand as its head.
  9. ^ Jespersen (1965), pp. 66, 70.
  10. ^ Quirk et al. (1985), pp. 288ff.
  11. ^ Huddleston and Pullum, pp. 1758–1759.
  13. ^ Dunn and Alderfer, p. 354
  14. ^ Quinn, p. 106: "This list [... a check-list, from the American Ornithologists' Union] makes sure that each capitalized common name corresponds to one and only one scientific name and each scientific name corresponds to one and only capitalized common name."
  15. ^ Huddleston and Pullum (2002), pp. 521–522.
  16. ^ Huddleston and Pullum (2002), pp. 522, 1758. The authors use Cortina (manufactured by the company Ford) as an example of a "tradename but not a proper name" (p. 522).
  17. ^ Collier and Manley (1998), p. 20.
  18. ^ Binyong and Felley (1990), pp. 138–190.
  19. ^ Po-Ching and Rimmington (2006), pp. 10–13. The authors distinguish proper nouns, common nouns, abstract nouns, material nouns, and collective nouns.
  20. ^ Packard (2000), pp. 106–109.


  • AMA Manual of Style (2007; 10th ed.). Iverson, Cheryl (ed.). Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-517633-9.
  • Anderson, John M. (2007). The Grammar of Proper Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Associated Press Stylebook (2007; 42 ed.). The Associated Press. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00489-8.
  • Binyong, Yin and Felley, Mary (1990). Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography. Beijing: Sinolingua.
  • Burridge, Kate (2002). "New Standards in a Glorious Grammar: Review of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds)". Australian Book Review, No. 246, November. pp. 62–63.
  • Chalker, Sylvia (1992). "Proper noun". In Tom McArthur (ed.). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Collier, Mark and Manley, Bill (1998). How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Dunn, Jon L., Alderfer, Jonathan (2006). National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. National Geographic Books.
  • Greenbaum, Sidney (1996). The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Huddleston, Rodney and Pullum, Geoffrey (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Jespersen, Otto (1965). The Philosophy of Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Po-Ching, Yip and Rimmington, Don (2006; 2nd ed.). Chinese: An Essential Grammar. Oxford: Taylor & Francis (Routledge).
  • Quirk, Randolph et al.(eds.) (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
  • Valentine, Tim, Brennen, Tim, and Brédart, Serge (1996). The Cognitive Psychology of Proper Names: On the Importance of Being Ernest. Oxford: Routledge.