History
The English word noun comes from the Latin nōmen, meaning "name" or "noun",, a cognate of the Ancient Greek ónoma (also meaning "name" or "noun").
Word classes like nouns were first described by Pāṇini in the Sanskrit language and by Ancient Greek grammarians, and were defined by the grammatical forms that they take. In Greek and Sanskrit, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number.
Because nouns and adjectives share these three categories, Dionysius Thrax does not clearly distinguish between the two, and uses the term ónoma for both, although some of the words that he describes as paragōgón (pl. paragōgá) "derived" are adjectives.
Read more about this topic: Noun
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