This chapter addresses the most distinctive semantic, morphological and syntactic properties of nouns. Section 15.1 provides a brief characterization of the category of nouns and noun phrases by describing some of their more conspicuous properties. This will help the reader to identify nouns and noun phrases in Dutch by considering their form, function and position in the sentence. Section 15.2 presents a semantic classification of nouns and describes the way in which the semantic differences are formally expressed. Nouns are like verbs and adjectives in that they form an open class, i.e. they cannot be exhaustively listed because new nominal elements are constantly being introduced into the language through derivation, compounding, borrowing, etc. Sections 15.3 and 15.4 contain a concise discussion of derivation and compounding, which will remain relatively incomplete due to the complexity of these morphological processes. However, the nominalization process will be discussed in more detail in Sections 16.2.3 and 16.2.4.