Nouns are words which indicate a person, place, animal, thing, or idea, like "thing", "rabbit", "Samuel", and "Buddhism" in Modern English.

In Old English they have 3 genders (masculine, neuter, feminine), 2 numbers (singular, plural), and 5 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental). Note that the so-called "genders" were purely grammatical genders - they very often did not correspond to natural gender. For example the word ƿīf - "woman" is actually of the neuter (grammatical) gender, not the feminine (natural gender).

In Old English, nouns were inflected (they changed how they were written and spoken) to add little bits of extra information to communicate their function within the sentence and the number of the noun (whether singular or plural). Although learning a language with three different genders might seem hard, it isn't really very hard - it can easily enough be done if you just make sure to memorize nouns along with their definitive articles, because the definitive articles for each grammatical gender are unique. For example, don't just remember the word "ġiefu" - remember "sēo ġiefu", so you'll always know it's a feminine noun - you can easily just not say the article if you don't need to; on the other hand, if you don't know the gender of a noun, it might be annoying.

Nouns were the essential element to a noun phrase (either a noun or a pronoun had to be in a noun phrase), which is an important part of most sentences. Also in the noun phrase you could put noun modifiers, like numbers, adjectives (words that describe, like "cool" or "special"), articles ("the" or "a/an), and demonstratives ("this" and "that"). All those other words within a noun phrase had to have the same number, grammatical gender, and case as the noun that they were modifying. In addition, most adjectives (but not most numerals) could either be declined strong or weak depending on what other words were used with them. For more information on adjective declension, please see the page about Old English adjectives.

Noun Declensions

Nouns are divided into two main categories of declension in Old English: the so called "Strong" and "Weak" nouns. There are other minor declension groups, as well; but most nouns fall into these two classifications. If a noun belongs to a particular declension group, it can usually only be declined that way. Occasionally, you can decline an Old English noun one of several ways. Whether or not a noun is weak or strong does not affect whether or not the modifiers (adjectives) used with it are declined weak or strong.

Which declension a noun takes must be memorized along with the noun itself. Often, the noun itself may give clues as to which declension it takes, but not always.

Appositives

In Old English, as in Modern English, nouns could sometimes be used similarly to an adjective to modify another noun. These are called appositives. One example of appositives in Modern English is in titles: "Queen Elizabeth", "Brother John", "General Schwartzkopf", where "Queen", "Brother", and "General" are all nouns used to modify other nouns.

To get a better understanding of how appositives were used in Old English, see the appositives page.