Page 101 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

A common noun is a word that indicates a person, place, thing, or idea. A
proper noun is a specific one of those.

Among its other roles, a noun is often the subject of a sentence—the thing
that is doing the verb—or it can be the object—the thing that is being acted upon

by the subject.
Nouns sometimes behave like adjectives when they appear in a modifying

■position before another noun: The bicycle tire has an air leak.

Bicycle is a noun modifying the noun tire to tell us what kind of tire it is, and air
is a noun modifying the noun leak to tell us what kind of leak it is.

8.1 Compound Nouns

Sometime nouns appearing together, or even with other parts of speech, become

idiomatic compound nouns, so that they travel in the language together. By
idiomatic I mean they behave as a unit and, to a lesser or greater degree, amount

to more than the sum of their parts.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ice cream coffee shop courthouse football payday well-being Johnny-

■ come-lately mother-in-law The first two examples above are called open
compounds, as there is a space between the words. The third and fourth are

closed compounds: the space between the words has been removed, but we
still have an understanding of each half as an independent word that

contributes its own meaning. The last two are hyphenated. As you can see, in

some cases a compound includes more than two words.
Especially in North American English, the slow trend is for more compounds

to be closed, and for far fewer hyphenated forms to be used, even over recent
decades. Among style guides and dictionaries, you will find wide variability. For

example, these are the preferred forms of several related compounds from a
bunch of different dictionaries.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ firebomb fire drill fire extinguisher/fire-extinguisher firefighter fire hose
■ ■ ■