There are many common suffixes used to form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (as in shrinkage), -hood (as in sisterhood), and so on, although many nouns are base forms not containing any such suffix (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 nouns (Cyrus, China vs. frog, milk) or as concrete nouns and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs. heat, prejudice).

A grammatical distinction is often made between count (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 -[e]s (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 synesis; it is more common in British than American English.

*See English plural § 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, formed by the addition of -'s (as in John's, children's), or just an apostrophe(with no change in pronunciation) in the case of -[e]s plurals and sometimes other words ending with -s (the dogs' owners, Jesus' love). More generally, the ending can be applied to noun phrases (as in the man you saw yesterday's sister); see below. The possessive form can be used either as a determiner (John's cat) or as a noun phrase (John's is the one next to Jane's).

The status of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate.It differs from the noun inflection of languages such as German, in that the genitive ending may attach to the last word of the phrase. To account for this, the possessive can be analysed, for instance as a clitic construction (an "enclitic postposition"[8]) or as an inflection[9][10] of the last word of a phrase ("edge inflection").