Adjectives used as nouns

Posted Thursday, October 09, 2008

Comments (5)

Just as nouns can function like adjectives, as we highlighted in our previous post, so can adjectives function like nouns.

Merriam-Webster editor Neil Serven gives us an explanation:

For example, the words poor and sick are easily recognizable as adjectives:

We were too poor to afford a car.

He was sick with a head cold.

As with most adjectives, poor and sick can be used before a noun to modify that noun:

poor artists

a sick patient

But what happens when such an adjective is preceded by the but not followed by a noun?

She gives money to the poor.

Nurses care for the sick.

The words poor and sick here are used to refer to poor people and sick people, respectively, with the nouns they modify omitted. While they function like nouns here, they are not defined as nouns because they do not meet any of the other criteria that typically distinguishes a word as a noun.

A lot of adjectives are used this way, many referring to classes of people:

a shelter for the homeless

a word to the wise

the meek shall inherit the earth

tax breaks for the insured

A lot of these kinds of adjectives can be found in titles of works. The title of Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead contains two adjectives that are essentially functioning as nouns. The same goes for Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. Consider also the Martin Scorsese film The Departed or the American TV soap opera The Young and the Restless.

Join the discussion!

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Oct 10, 2008 05:57:22 am, Amir:

Just dropped a line to say THANKS A MILLION for your wonderful website. I love all parts of it.

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Oct 14, 2008 08:47:30 am, Brett:

I'm not sure why MW chooses to call categories such as noun, adjective, etc. "functions". What does it mean to say something is functioning as a noun (function)? Or when a noun is functioning as a subject, we have a function functioning as another function. Odd.

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Oct 19, 2008 11:57:53 am, Britt:

This proves a point!!!!!!!!!!!

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Oct 28, 2008 11:07:18 am, Peter Sokolowski:

To answer Brett's question: I can understand your frustration. The reason is partly a convention based on the limitation of the printed page and partly an ideal of simple efficiency in presentation.

When an adjective like poor serves as a noun, the meaning the word has in a sentence is the same but the grammatical part of speech has changed. If the dictionary were to print "having little money or few possessions" at poor as an adjective and then print "a person or group having little money or few possessions" at poor as a noun, the dictionary would balloon in size -- effectively reducing the number of different words that can be included.

Consequently, transparent definitions that would lead to redundant entries are eliminated so that more words can be defined in the dictionary. This expresses a certain elasticity that is a characteristic of English grammar and allows dictionaries to explain a broader vocabulary.

 

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Nov 16, 2008 10:47:31 pm, Julien:

Recently I received a letter that was first written in Dutch and then translated into English. It contains the sentence "...that blends the commercial and the residential."  and I am wondering whether this is grammatically correct. I am not a native English speaker but somehow it sounds strange.