Difference between Common Noun and Proper Noun

The Noun is simply a naming word. It is classified into four kinds. Common, Proper, Collective, and Abstract Nouns. Among these common and proper nouns have a close relation. In this article, let’s understand the basic difference between a common noun and a proper noun. 

Difference between Common noun and Proper noun

A common noun is a name given in common to many proper nouns of a similar class or kind. Thus the name of the common quality of many proper nouns is a common noun. For example, Rama, Ravi, John, Krishna, James are the proper names of different people. But we can observe that common quality among them, i.e, they are Men / Boys. Hence the nouns Men or Boys is a Common Noun. Let us see some example sentences

• Rama is a great king
• New York is a beautiful city
• Ravi is a good boy
• Sita is a good girl
• IFB is a good Air Conditioner

Observe the above sentences- you have proper and common nouns at the start and the end respectively. Thus the name given in common to a group of the same class or kind is ‘common’ and the name given in particular to one person or item of the group is ‘proper’. Some more examples of common and proper nouns are:

• Bike (Common Noun) – Pulsar (Proper Noun)
• Coffee Shop (Common Noun) – Star Bucks (Proper Noun)
• Laptop (Common Noun) – Mac Book (Proper Noun)
• company (Common Noun) – Google (Proper Noun)
• Social network (Common Noun) – Facebook (Proper Noun)

Another important difference is that a proper noun generally has a capital letter at the beginning the latter need not necessarily start with a capital letter. We can write– man but not ashoka (the first letter must be capitalized) irrespective of the position of the word in the sentence. This is how we generally identify a proper noun. 

For More on Nouns, click here

For more article on grammar, click here

Like us on Facebook