= 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.<Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines>[NOUN, common-noun scope and abstract examples; PROPN, naming distinction]{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.
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