Many common Suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (as in shrinkage), -hood (as in sister), and so on, although many nouns are base forms not containing any such suffice (such as cat, grass, France). Nouns are also often created by conversion of verbs or adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned reading).
Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper nouns and common (cirrus, china vs frog, milk) or as concrete nouns and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs heat prejudice). A grammatical distinction is often made between counts (countable) nouns such as clock and city and non-count (uncountable) nouns such as milk and decor. Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as the word ''wine (This is a good wine, I prefer red wine).
Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. In most cases the plural is formed from the singular by adding (as in dogs, bushes), although there are also irregular forms (woman\women, foot\feet, etc), including cases where the two forms are identical (sheep, series). For more details, see English Plural. Certain nouns can be used with plural verbs even though they are singular in form, as in the government were (Where the government is considered to refer to the people constituting the government). This is a form of system, it is more common in British than American English. see English plural and singulars with collective meaning treated as plural.
English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms through the addition of -'s (as in john 's, children's) or just an apostrophe (with no change pronunciation) in the case of plurals and sometimes other ending with -s (the dogs' owners, Jesus ' love).
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