TRANSCRIPT OF THE ABOVE VIDEO: English Grammar Lesson: Compound Nouns - Learn How To Use and Understand Essential English Grammar

Hi everyone. I hope you’re well. I'm here answering another one of your questions, this time a student asked me what is a compound noun.

Wow, great question. We don't really need to know the technical grammatical term, but we need to know what it is.

So, a compound noun is when you've got two nouns, ok, so you might have house and boat, and a compound noun is when you make a new word out of these two separate words. So, we've got house and boat. We put it together to make a new word, which is house boat.

The same thing goes for cheese cake, cheesecake, or, oh what else could we have, maybe um pony tail, ponytail or, oh gosh, I can't think, let's have a look, what else have we got? I've got a list here maybe baby sitter, babysitter, or snow flake, snowflake. 

So the separate words, the two nouns have a separate meaning by themselves. You put them together to have a new word with a new meaning.

We might have something like wall paper, wallpaper, or maybe air craft, aircraft, or horse shoe, horseshoe, or maybe even honey moon, honeymoon, completely different meaning there, or we might have something like cart wheel, cartwheel, or sleep walk, sleepwalk.

So, there you go. They're what we call compound nouns. I hope that really helped. Your job is to write a list of as many compound nouns as you can think of. Have fun. Bye.