We explain what countable and uncountable nouns are, their characteristics and examples of each type.
What are countable and uncountable nouns?
In grammarWhen we distinguish between countable or countable nouns and uncountable or uncountable nouns, we establish two categories of substantive words based on their ability to refer to objects that can be counted, that is, enumerated, or not.
That is, countable nouns refer to separable units, which are easy to conceive in isolation, and to which we could refer by detailing their exact number.
By contrast, uncountable nouns are those that refer to difficult-to-pinpoint objects in separate units, which we normally refer to in set, in an imprecise and indeterminate way, sometimes because it makes no sense to list them.
For example: if we talk about noun “Water”, we are in the presence of an uncountable word, since we cannot count the waters (one water, two waters…), since they are indistinguishable, they constitute a shapeless and continuous mass. For this we would need some type of measure, expressed in another noun such as "glass", which is countable. Thus, we can list the number of "glasses of water" we drink per day.
Examples of countable nouns
| Trees | Apples |
| Planes | Eyes |
| Drums | Birds |
| Bottles | Walls |
| Buttons | Pears |
| Beds | Dogs |
| songs | Persons |
| Houses | Stones |
| Spoons | Legs |
| Knives | Plates |
| Fingers | Poems |
| Buildings | Doors |
| Drawers | phones |
| Keys | Televisions |
| Hands | Forks |
| Seas | Cups |
Examples of uncountable nouns
| Water | Milk |
| Earth | Juice |
| Fire | Rice |
| Air | Jamon |
| Music | Soup |
| Poetry | Delusion |
| Fauna | Flour |
| Flora | Oil |
| Money | Sugar |
| Wheat | Petroleum |
| Progress | Gasoline |
| Traffic | Oxygen |
| Transport | Plastic |
| Trash | Plumage |
| Blood | Weather |
| Luggage | Internet |
| Pollution | Satisfaction |