Finding abstract nouns in a sentence?

Answer 1

Recognizing abstract nouns in a sentence:

Is the noun something that you can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched in some way? Is it a something physical? If you can say yes, then it's a concrete noun.

Abstract nouns are things that can't be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched; they are things that can only be known, understood, learned, believed, or felt emotionally.

There are some nouns that can go either way depending on use. For example, there's the physical heart that you can feel beating in your chest and the heart of the matter or a broken heart.

Then there are the tricky ones, the ones that you have to think about. For example, the abstract noun anger; you can see the angry face, you can hear the angry words, you can see the person twitching with anger, but those are faces and words, the anger is what the person is feeling inside.

Even more tricky abstract nouns are such words as friend or wife. They seem to be concrete nouns because you can see and touch your friend or your wife. However, if I said, 'Look, there's my wife Janet and her friend Janice.' When you look at the two women that I'm indicating, you can't tell my wife from the friend. This is something I know and I will let you know when I introduce them. Or nouns like oxygen and carbon dioxide, you can't see them, hear them, or know that you're touching them, but they can be detected and measured with instruments; oxygen and carbon dioxide are physical and they are concrete nouns. There are some nouns that even the experts can't agree on the designation, and nouns that I can't understand why they're designated as concrete or abstract.

Some teachers of English use a simpler method of determining if the noun is an abstract noun. They tell the student to draw a picture of the word; if you can't draw it, it must be an abstract noun. That doesn't help with the tricky nouns but it is a place to start.