noun

case

A grammatical form showing a word's role in a sentence.

The ending changes to show the noun's grammatical case.

Etymology

Latin casus meant a fall and was used for grammatical inflection. The image of a form departing from its starting position underlies the grammatical term for a word’s syntactic form.

More examples

  • Students identify the case of each Latin noun.
  • The pronoun's case depends on its role in the sentence.
  • This language marks several different cases.

Forms

case · cases

Similar words

gender
A different grammatical classification, not a word's syntactic role.
number
Marks distinctions such as singular and plural rather than syntactic role.