''Adnoun'' is a

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

term used with two different meanings.

Hyponym of ''adjective''

An ''adnoun'' is a kind of

lexical category In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...

. In English, it is a word that is usually an

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

, but is being used as a

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

. The origin of the word is thought to date to around 1763-1792. Often these usages are simply identified as the noun form of the word. Examples: * "guide-dogs for the blind", "blind" is an adnoun because it stands in for the noun phrase "blind people" * "tax cuts for the rich", "rich" is an adnoun because it stands in for the noun phrase "rich people"

Synonym of ''adjective''

''Adnoun'' is an alternative term, which is considered to be archaic, for ''adjective''. As John Eliot states in his 1666 ''Indian Grammar Begun...'', "An Adnoun is a part of Speech that attendeth upon a Noun, and signifieth the Qualification thereof."

References

Syntactic entities Parts of speech {{ling-morph-stub