Nouns. The athematic nouns. Irregular strong nouns.

The OE noun had two grammatical categories: number and case. The category of number consisted of two members, singular and plural, they were well distinguished formally in all the declensions. The noun had four cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative.

OE nouns distinguished three genders: Masc., Fem. and Neut.

In Modern English almost all nouns are declined in pretty much the same way: we add -s to make plurals and -'s to make possessives. There are notable exceptions, however. The plural of ox is not oxes, but oxen, and the plural of child has the same ending, but preceded by -r-. And of course several very common nouns make plurals by changing their vowels: for example, tooth/teeth and mouse/mice. These nouns belong to different declensions.

Most nouns fall into one of two major declensions, conventionally called "strong" and "weak." There are also several minor declensions.

Often one cannot tell the gender of a noun from its ending: strong masculines and neuters differ only in the nominative/accusative plural, and gender is never distinguished in the dative singular or in the genitive and dative plural. Further, one cannot always tell the case: nominative and accusative singular are not distinguished in masculine and neuter nouns, accusative, genitive and dative singular are not distinguished in feminine nouns, and nominative and accusative plural are never distinguished at all.

Weak nouns make even fewer distinctions of gender and case than the strong nouns do: the rule that neuter words do not distinguish between nominative and accusative accounts for its having accusative singular -e where the masculine and feminine have -an; otherwise, the only difference among the genders is that the masculine nominative singular ends in -a while the neuter and feminine end in -e. Most case endings are simply -an. Table 6.5 adds these endings to three common nouns.

The athematic nouns are those that sometimes have i-mutation of the root vowel instead of an ending; they are the ancestors of Modern English nouns like man/men and tooth/teeth (see table 6.6).

Irregular strong nouns. In addition, masculine and neuter nouns whose main vowel is short 'æ' and end with a single consonant change the vowel to 'a' in the plural:

ðæt flod weox ðā and ābær upp ðone arc — subject, active agent ('that flood increased then and bore up the arc')

wearð ðā ælc ðing cwices ādrenct — subject, recipient of an action or state ('was then everything alive drowned')