Nouns (nafnorð) are the class of words that contain objects, creatures, ideas and so on such as: car, human, leg, happiness, Iceland.

All nouns in Icelandic have a gender (he , she , or it ). They can exist both with and without the definite article (the “the”) attached at the end.

Nouns are declined in four cases: the nominative , accusative , dative and genitive , depending on what is happening to the word in the sentence. Different prepositions and verbs cause the noun to use a particular case. The default case is the nominative case.

If a word ends in a vowel in all cases, its declension is said to be weak. If a word ends sometimes in a consonant, its declension is said to be strong. Weak nouns have a more regular declension pattern, but both types do have sound shifts.