yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Concrete and abstract nouns | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hello Garans.

So today I'd like to talk to you about the idea of concrete and abstract nouns. Before we do that, I'd like to get into some origins—some word origins or etymology.

Um, so let's take each of these words in turn. I think by digging into what these words mean literally, what they mean and where they come from, we'll get a better understanding of this concept. Both of these words come to us from Latin. Concrete comes to us from the Latin "concretus," which means "to grow together." So this part of it means "grown," and this part means "together," and refers to something that, you know, has grown together and become thick and kind of hard to get through and physical.

The connotation here is that this is a physical thing. Something that is concrete is physical. Abstract, on the other hand, means "to draw something away." So something that is abstract is drawn away from the real, from the concrete, from the physical. So this is not physical.

We make this distinction in English when we’re talking about nouns. Is it something that is concrete? Is it something that you can look at, or pick up, or smell, or sense? Or is it something that is abstract—something that isn’t physical but can still be talked about?

So, for example, the word "sadness" is a noun, right? This is definitely a noun; it's got this noun-making ending, this noun-forming suffix "ness." You know, we take the adjective "sad" and we toss this "ness" part onto it, and we've got a noun. But can you see sadness? Is it something you can pick up? Sure, you can tell by being, you know, observant and empathetic that your friend is sad. But it's not something that you can pick up.

It's not—you can't be like a measurable degree of sad. You couldn't take someone's sadness, put it under a microscope, and say, "Oh Roberta, you are 32 degrees micro sad." You know, it's not something physical.

Concrete things, on the other hand, are things that we can see, or count, or measure—just parts of the physical world. So anything you look at, like a dog, is concrete. A ball is concrete. A cliff is concrete. Happiness is abstract. The idea of freedom is abstract.

Though the presence of freedom in your life may manifest in physical objects, like, "Oh, my parents let me have the freedom to eat ice cream." Ice cream is, you know, a concrete noun. But freedom—the thing that allows you, you know, the permission that you get from your parents to have ice cream—that's not a physical object.

So that's basically the difference. A concrete noun is a physical object, and an abstract noun is not. This is why I really wanted to hit the idea that a noun can be a person, place, thing, or idea, because nouns can be ideas. And those ideas tend to be abstract: sadness, happiness, freedom, permission, liberty, injustice—all of these are abstract ideas.

That's the difference. You can learn anything, David.

More Articles

View All
Derivatives of tan(x) and cot(x) | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We already know the derivatives of sine and cosine. We know that the derivative with respect to x of sine of x is equal to cosine of x. We know that the derivative with respect to x of cosine of x is equal to negative sine of x. So, what we want to do in…
Calculating a confidence interval for the difference of proportions | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
Duncan is investigating if residents of a city support the construction of a new high school. He’s curious about the difference of opinion between residents in the north and south parts of the city. He obtained separate random samples of voters from each …
Welcome to Earth | Official Trailer #2 | Disney+
(Adventurous music) - [Will] I’m throwing myself into the unknown. - I almost guarantee you’re going to survive. - Am I? (Will laughing) (Adventurous music continues) - [Will] There’s a new breed of explorers taking me to the ends of the earth to discover…
Musings from Gary | Port Protection
We in Port Protection are very lucky for the abundance of seafood. Wildlife, most everything we get comes from nature. The waters of Port Protection present a feast to those who know how to catch it. But few take better advantage of her bounty than 36-yea…
Private jet expert destroys noob!
So, I’ve always wondered how much you need to be making to comfortably own a private jet. This 20-year-old Citation X will run you $5.8 million and carries eight passengers. Okay, so this is not a Citation X. That’s the first. This guy doesn’t know what …
Valence electrons and ionic compounds | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to get even more appreciation for why the periodic table of elements is so useful. In particular, we’re going to focus on groups of the periodic table of elements. When we talk about a group, we’re just talking about a column. A…