Proper names are another important and anciently studied linguistic category. While parts of speech are generally assigned to individual words or morphemes, a proper name is often an entire multiword phrase, like the name "Marie Curie", the location "New York City", or the organization "Stanford University". We'll use the term named entity for, roughly speaking, anything that can be referred to with a named entity proper name: a person, a location, an organization, although as we'll see the term is commonly extended to include things that aren't entities per se.