As you know, common nouns are general names we give to ordinary or common objects, animals, or people, for example: table, chair, lion, rhino, girl, man, doctor, actor. They can also refer to groups of things, and can also show if a person or animal is male or female. Some common nouns are often paired together, for example: It’s raining cats and dogs outside! Let’s have fish and chips for lunch.

There are many types of common nouns. Some, like the ones above, are obviously nouns – you can see and touch them. Others, like “happiness”, are harder to recognise as nouns, because you can’t touch or see it. And sometimes a word that you normally associate with a verb is actually a noun, for example, in the sentence “I like running”, “running” is a noun, as it is a “thing” that you like.