A determiner is a word that is used to identify or quantify a noun or noun phrase. Common determiners include words like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘some’, ‘several’ and ‘many’. They appear before nouns and noun phrases in a sentence and help make it clear which noun is being talked about. They indicate whether the noun is definite (specific) or indefinite (general) and can also indicate the number or amount of it (singular, plural, etc). For example: ‘I read a book’; ‘She ate some cake’; ‘The cat saw the bird’. Here, ‘a’, ‘some’, and ‘the’ are all determiners that identify the nouns that come after them. Determiners are also known as articles in linguistics.
