of speech comes to be used as a noun. This can be a way to create new nouns, or to use other words in ways that resemble nouns. In French and Spanish, for example, adjectives frequently act as nouns referring to people who have the characteristics denoted by the adjective. This sometimes happens in English as well, as in the following examples: See also Description Grammatical case Phi features Punctuation Reference Notes References Bibliography Further reading Laycock, Henry (2005). "Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns", Draft version of entry in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Oxford: Elsevier. For definitions of nouns based on the concept of "identity criteria": Geach, Peter. 1962. Reference and Generality. Cornell University Press. For more on identity criteria: Gupta, Anil. 1980, The logic of common nouns. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. For the concept that nouns are "prototypically referential": Croft, William. 1993. "A noun is a noun is a noun — or is it? Some reflections on the universality of semantics". Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. Joshua S. Guenter, Barbara A. Kaiser and Cheryl C. Zoll, 369–80. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. For an attempt to relate the concepts of identity criteria and prototypical referentiality: Baker, Mark. 2003, Lexical Categories: verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. External links Nouns – Nouns described by The Idioms Dictionary. Grammar Parts of speech Autological words