English has a few suffixes that can make abstract nouns out of adjectives: There’s the relatively rare –cy, which turns fluent into fluency and idiot into idiocy. There’s the more common –ty or –ity ...

Here's a little English grammar lesson for readers, free of charge. Today's lesson concerns nouns. You may remember this from your schooling: A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, thought, or ...

OF ALL the novelties of France under President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the more arresting is the decline of the abstract noun. In the past, no French leader would make a speech without liberal doses ...

Some nouns, particularly abstract nouns, have to be followed by a prepositional phrase in order to demonstrate what they relate to. They cannot just stand by themselves. There is usually only one ...

The conventional grammar wisdom is that turning verbs into nouns — or what is termed “nominalization” in linguistics — is bad for the health of one's prose. The evidence is painfully clear. Take this ...