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Individual Nouns & Their Types with Examples in Detail

What is an individual noun?

Individual nouns (sustantivos individuals) refer to single entities that can be divided into units. They can be used in the and the plural.

What type of nouns are individuals?

(uncountable) The characteristics that contribute to the differentiation or distinction of someone or something from a group of otherwise comparable identities. (countable) A person.

A collective noun is a word or phrase that represents a group of people or things but is treated as a singular entity (Hint: a “collection” of people or things). Even though you can count the individual members of the group, you usually think of the individuals as a group, a whole, or as one unit.

Individual nouns

First of all, you should know that nouns are words used to name people, animals, and things. For this reason, it is also called a name. This type of word is one of the most common in our language and has its own classification. This falls into two categories:

Individual nouns
Collective nouns

A specific noun is therefore a noun whose reference is a single thing. Therefore, these nouns refer to people, animals, or things that you can name yourself. Note that proper nouns are not singular. Singular and plural references to named numbers. In other words, each singular noun names an entity. If you still need to name individual entities, use the plural form. Let’s see an example:

Dog: A singular proper noun. In other words, it is a single entity, so it can refer to a specific dog. In this case, it will be a dog.

A collective noun, usually expressed in the singular, is a named entity that represents a group of people, animals, or things. To repeat the previous example, we can say that collective nouns such as packs can be used if they mean a large group of dogs. Other collective nouns include herd, flock, and flock.

Types of individual nouns

Within the individual nouns, we can find different types according to different criteria such as:

According to the nature of the entity to which they refer
According to your gender
According to their number

1-According to the nature of the entity to which they refer

Within this classification we can find the following classification:

Individual nouns: they name an entity in a general way, that is, it is not specified. These can be children, men, women, city, country, food … etc.

Own individual nouns: they designate people, animals, or things, in particular, these are always written with capital letters. They can be Madrid, Valencia, Soria, Juan, Pedro, Manuel, Lidia, Alba… etc.
Concrete individual nouns: they are used when naming a person, animal, or thing that is material, real or that can be physically perceived. Some examples: dog, table, chair, horse, woman, man… etc.
Abstract individual nouns: they name subjective, immaterial entities, ideas, or emotions. Some examples of these nouns are friendship, adventure, grief, joy, disappointment, strength… .etc.
According to your gender

We can also classify individual nouns according to their gender. So we could say that we can find:

Individual feminine nouns: they have feminine gender and the articles and adjectives that accompany them always agree with this gender. For example (the) table, (the) motorcycle, (a) house, (this) girl… .etc.
Male individual nouns: in this case, they will have a masculine gender and, like the feminine ones, they will be accompanied by adjectives and articles that match their gender. Some examples: (the) cat, (the) sofa (a) tree, (a) bird… etc.
Neutral individual nouns: there are also those words that do not have gender or this is neutral. They are accompanied by the article: (the) good (the) lasting (the) bad, (the) special … etc.

2-According to their number:

As we have already pointed out, words can designate entities individually or several entities within them. So we can meet:

Singular individual nouns: of which we have already spoken, such as dog, dress, lie, truth, song … etc.
Plural individual nouns: those that designate more than one identity, for example, dogs, dresses, lies, truths, songs… .etc. Individual nouns their types with examples