That Moment When Nouns Become Adjectives and Adjectives Become Nouns
One more thing you should know
about adjectives is that, sometimes, a word that is normally used as a noun can
function as an adjective, depending on its placement.
Example: Never try to pet someone’s guide dog without asking
permission first.
Guide is a noun. But in this sentence, it modifies dog. It works the other way, too.
Some words that are normally adjectives can function as nouns:
Example: The government should do something
for the jobless.
In the
context of this sentence, jobless is
functioning as a noun. Adjectives can be used with the article ‘the’. These expressions are
plural. Examples are: the rich, the poor, the
jobless, the unemployed, the deaf, the blind etc. It can be
hard to wrap your head around this if you think of adjectives and nouns only as
particular classes of words. But the terms “adjective” and “noun” aren’t just
about a word’s form—they’re also about its function.
