Common noun

A common noun is a noun used to classify an entity or concept rather than to provide an individual name. It can describe a concrete thing, an event or an abstraction. The contrast with a proper noun concerns grammatical use, beyond whether the referent happens to be unique in a particular conversation.^[ref]

In the village teacher, teacher remains a common noun even if the village has only one teacher. In two explosions, explosions names events and shows plural grammatical number; an event meaning does not make the form a verb. These examples separate semantic reference from lexical category.

For a text corpus using Universal Dependencies, the tag NOUN identifies this category while PROPN identifies proper nouns. Sentence-initial capitalization is therefore inadequate as the sole labeling rule. A repeatable annotation procedure considers context and the scheme's category definitions.