We identify people, animals, places, things and even feelings, experiences or ideas by giving them names. In grammar, we call those names “nouns”. When babies first learn language, they usually start by learning nouns, as they point to people and objects and give them names, such as “mama”. It is much easier to identify these concrete nouns that you can see and touch than it is to identify the more abstract nouns, like happiness, or politics. These are still used as “nouns” in sentences, but you can’t exactly point to them.

So nouns can be ordinary objects, abstract feelings, and also names of people and places etc (these are proper nouns). There are three nouns in the sentence below:

Professor Dhlamini gave a presentation about xenophobia.