We know that nouns are parts of speech that are fundamental to learning English and, simply put, nouns are the names of things. Similarly, verbs are parts of speech that describe some action. Both nouns and verbs are essential to complete a sentence and they are so versatile that they assume many forms. In fact, it is almost always true that a sentence has to have both a verb and a noun in it in order to make sense.
As is fairly common in English, several words appear in different parts of speech and are not rigidly compartmentalised. In fact, we have already been exposed to several peculiar characteristics of English such as homophones and idioms and also words that are adjectives formed from nouns and compound nouns formed from various combinations of words. Verbs and nouns can also be confusing!
You often come across certain words in sentences that stump you because you thought they were verbs, but it turns out that they actually were nouns! ‘My LOVE for her is eternal’ and ‘I LOVE her’ are good examples. LOVE in the first sentence is a noun and in the second sentence it is a verb. To check if a word in the sentence is a noun you could try using the words 'the', 'an' or 'a' before the word and see if it still makes sense. If it does, then it is a noun. To check if a word in the sentence is a verb you could try using the words 'I', or 'you' or any noun before the word and see if it still makes sense. If it does, then it is a verb. When we apply this test to the two sentences containing LOVE we see that it works.
English has many words which double as verbs and nouns and it is good to know more about them. The following quiz teaches you a little bit about such words.