Collective noun

In linguistics, a collective noun is a word used to define a group of objects, where "objects" can be people, animals, inanimate things, concepts, or other things. For example, in the phrase "a pride of lions", pride is a collective noun.

Most collective nouns encountered in everyday speech (such as "group") are mundane and are not specific to one kind of constituent object (for example, the uses "group of people", "group of dogs", and "group of ideas" are all correct uses). Others, especially words belonging to the large subset of collective nouns known as terms of venery (words for groups of animals), are specific to one kind of constituent object (for example, "pride" as a term of venery refers to lions— but not to dogs or llamas). (Terms of venery are further discussed in a subsequent section.)

Collective nouns should not be confused with the collective grammatical number.

Mass noun

In linguistics, a mass noun (also uncountable noun or non-count noun) is a common noun that presents entities as an unbounded mass. Given that different languages have different grammatical resources, the actual test for which nouns are mass nouns may vary from language to language. In English, mass nouns are characterized by the fact that they cannot be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article (a(n)). Mass nouns combine with expressions like too much ("too much water"), while count nouns don't (*"too much chair(s)")

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to. Collectively, adjectives form one of the traditional eight parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that used to be considered adjectives but that are now recognized to be different.

Not all languages have adjectives, but most, including English, do. (English adjectives include big, old, and tired, among many others.) Those that don't typically use words of another part of speech, often verbs, to serve the same semantic function; for example, such a language might have a verb that means "to be big", and would use a construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what English expresses as "big house". Even in languages that do have adjectives, one language's adjective might not be another's; for example, where English has "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), French has "avoir faim" (literally "to have hunger"), and where Hebrew has the adjective "זקוק" (zaqūq, roughly "in need of"), English uses the verb "to need".

In most languages with adjectives, they form an open class of words; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation.