Question

Is “year” an adjective or noun? How can you tell ?

Answer 1

Hint: An adjective is a word that describes something. Example: a “big” house. Whereas a noun is the name of a person, place or thing. Example: Man, woman, car, building etc. We will see what properties the word “year” have.

Complete answer:
Let us discuss if the word ‘year’ is a noun or an adjective.
A noun is the name of a person, place or thing. Example: Girl, boy, chair, book, Tokyo, beach etc. A noun can be anything and it acts as the subject in a sentence.
An adjective is a word that gives us more information about a noun. It describes how or what a noun is. Adjectives are quality words that describe the quality of the noun. Example: beautiful, smart, intelligent, easy, simple etc.

Example:- Noun: boy.
Adjective:- ‘smart’ boy.

The word ‘ year’ does not describe any quality of anything, therefore chances of it being an adjective has been ruled out. It is simply a term that is used to refer to time. Therefore, it is a noun.
Although if we would have put descriptive words before the word ‘year’, it would describe an adjective. Example: The year 2020 was an unpredictable year. The word ‘unpredictable ‘ is an adjective.

Note:Noun and adjectives are parts of speech. Other parts of speech are:
Verb: A verb is defined as an action word that describes a particular action being done. Verbs describe things that nouns do. Example: run, eat, sleep, think etc.