ABSTRACT NOUNS

Abstract nouns are things like feelings, emotions, or states of mind. You can’t touch them or use any of your senses to identify them. Despite this, you can still ‘count’ some abstract nouns. For example, you could talk about the love of your life, or that you have a love for your favourite food; or simply that you love something (no article).

In our diagram, we use the example 'friendship'. The yellow arrows show us that one friendship amongst many – or any friendship – takes the indefinite article ‘a’. The blue arrow is for talking about a single specific friendship, which then takes us (via the red arrow) to the definite article ‘the’. The red arrows follow our line of thought when we want to talk about more than one friendship (friendships), so we can see that specific plurals take ‘the’. Finally, the green line is for talking about friendship in general (i.e. not a specific friendship). Note that both the single and plural in this case take no article.