Don't forget home boy. :)

"Home" in "home appliances" is not an adjective, it is a noun adjunct. What is the comparative of "home" homer ? Can we modify "home appliances" with an adverb such as very [home appliances], but it we use an adjective such as "hot", it can be modified by an adverb: very hot , really [hot], slowly [hot] never [hot]. I can add a suffix to "hot", hottish, and hotness but with home in "home appliances"?

@Mari-LouA Hmm. Many grammarians refer to this as a special case of adjectives. See, for example, grammarist.com/grammar/nouns-as-adjectives. The traditional definition of an adjective is, "a word that modifies a noun". In my example, "home" is modifying the noun "appliance", therefore by definition it is an adjective. The fact that some adverbs don't make sense with a given word claimed to be adjective is uninteresting. Lots of adverbs don't make sense with lots of adjectives. It doesn't make sense to say that something is "flowery hot" or "democratically hot".

Your own example fails. No one says, "It was a slowly hot day." He might say, "The day got hotter slowly", but not "It was a slowly hot day".

"It got slowly hot" sounds OK to me

@Mari-LouA Sure. But, "It was a slowly hot day"? No. "It got democratically hot"? No. My point is that the fact that a particular adverb doesn't make sense or is not conventionally used with a particular "alleged adjective" doesn't prove that that word isn't an adjective. I don't think your test is valid.

Suggest to me then an adverb that can modify the "home" in "home appliances", and I'll retract the downvote. Because I can only think of adjectives that modify home appliance, e.g. "inexpensive home appliances", "hi-tech home appliances", "the best childproof home appliances" etc.

Why shouldn't it be appliance that modifies home? In most cases that's exactly what it does. Whereas a home does not at all modify the appliance, which is pretty much the same anywhere. This makes more sense considering e.g. homework, where it implied cleaning, washing, knitting, etc at a time before schools were common place. Cp do the dishes ~ dish washing, dish washer. What about banana peel? It is Banane-n-Schale in German, roughly equivalent to bananaspeel. Both are ambiguous over plural and genitive. In house-X, no impression of 's, formerly -t, is left (cp hut)

@vectory You're confusing "modifies" in a grammatical sense with modifies in a practical sense. An engineer may modify a car, but that doesn't make an "engineer" an adjective. Grammatically, "home" modifies "appliance" become "home" describes what kind of appliance it is, namely, an appliance that is used in a home. As opposed most commonly to a "commercial appliance", one that is used for business. "Appliance" does not modify "home". It's not like there are multiple types of home, one of which is an "appliance" home.

@Mari-LouA How about "inarguably", as in, "This is inarguably a home appliance". But in any case, so what? What adverb could modify "first" in, "George Washington was our first president"? You couldn't say he was the "most first" or the "slowly first". No grammar book I have ever read says that you have to be able to find an adverb that would make sense with a given adjective for that word to qualify as an adjective. That's just not part of the definition of an adjective. Look at thefreedictionary.com/home. Three different widely-used dictionaries say that the word "home" is an ...

... adjective and then give examples very similar to mine, like "home taping", in the sense of producing tapes at home. This is not some crazy definition of adjective that I made up. It's the common definition used by just about every dictionary and grammar book out there.

I meet your challenge! 1. Was George Washington the very first President of the US? Was George Washington really the first President of the US?

@Mari-LouA Ok. "Is this toaster REALLY a home appliance?"

@Jay descriptively speaking, the relation "is" does not do justice to the variety of possible interpretations. It is prescriptive. Please don't miss the irony. A pro-pos "first", just to mess with your head, it is a noun. Compare prince, principle, president Ger Fürst. Other than that an informal the very first is not unheared of. Even most first has been quoted as uttered by nobody more qualified than the POTUS himself, lol. The contrast to commercial appliance is good, and if I go commercial, that makes it an adverb? I can go anything, or rather anywhere. I will go banana-s

@Mary-LouA to be fair though, you could also say "the very president", similar to how you supposed "high-tech" modifies the compound noun "home appliance". The truth is, differentvsyntax theories will draw different syntax trees, and save for looking up people's heads to discover that it's a cyclical graph of parallel processes instead of a straight up tree (admittedly, a graph can be modeled as a tree still, but looks quite different to the usual faire), there can be no definite answer. And there does not have to be. This question is a 100th dupe anyhow, just search for "go to home".

I don't know enough to set forth a convincing argument about what constitutes an adjective and it wasn't my intention to initiate an off-topic discussion. As I'm sure you are aware, the question title has since changed, it no longer asks if "home" is always a noun but if "home" is never an adverb. Could you modify your answer to reflect the shift of focus?

I might, however, post a question on EL&U asking whether a noun that modifies or adds an extra piece of information to another noun (compound noun) e.g. goat milk, school yard, mountain path is, linguistically speaking, also an adjective. And I'll probably add a link to this answer.

I've asked the mods to wipe the slate clean because there's too much clutter. If you agree to delete your comments, I'll also delete mine.

@Mari-Lou A. I find the numerous questions here asking if x is y part of speech in z context interesting but ultimately inconsequential, since classification alone does not tell us about usage in other contexts. In contentious cases such as here I think the best we can do is what you do in your comments, namely compare the word in question to a prototypical example of the proposed POS, pointing out the characteristics it shares with the prototype (e.g. hot in the case of an adjective) and those that it lacks.

@Mari-Lou A Classifying adjectives like nuclear behave very similarly to premodifying nouns.

@Shoe I agree totally. But further, the trouble is that naming, and accepting a name, adds endorsement to a preferred analysis. I think that 'modifier of verb', 'modifier of adjective' and 'modifier of prototypical adverb' all need separating, for instance, even though prototypical adverbs often 'appear' in the other usages.

@Shoe Well this is off on another tangent, but I think classifying things is extremely useful. Like if someone tells me that a certain object is a "shoe", I understand that that means that, like other shoes, I can wear it on my feet and it's purpose is to protect my feet from things that might be on the ground and make walking more comfortable. Of course all shoes are not identical, but by telling me that an object is a shoe I know that many statements that are generally true of shoes will probably be true of this object.

@Jay. I'm not sure if your analogy works. If you put water and flowers in your shoe, it is still a shoe, not a vase. But as far as language is concerned, there seem to be two positions: 1. that home is, say, an adverb that is being used in certain contexts as a noun/adjective etc (cf. the shoe as vase). Or 2. that in some contexts home is a noun and in others an adverb, adjective or even, according to some, a preposition. I hope the bounty can entice answers that address this issue.

This answer skips over the verb use: I am going to home the X axis (meaning: I am going to direct motion on the X axis (of this equipment) all the way to the "home" position). See 3dprinting.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homing

@Shoe In the 2012 dupe, the Aarts article states that there are three positions taken when POS-determining say 'painting' in 'Brown's deftly painting his daughter was a joy to behold': (1) It's a 70%V-30%N hybrid // (2) As it's nearer the verb side, let's call it a V (and arrange definitions, POS tests to justify this) // (3) It's both a V and a N here. (I anarchically go with (1) for most relevant ING-forms, but have to use (3) for 'galore' (DET + ADJ).

@Edwin Ashworth. Thanks. I'd be very interested to read that article, but I'm not sure which question you are referring to. Could you please post a link.

@shoe Sure, some words have multiple uses just like some physical objects have multiple uses. A shoe is not a good example for that. Well, I suppose saying that a shoe is primarily intended to be worn on your feet can be used as a flower pot is sort of analogous to saying that a certain word is normally a noun but can be used as a verb. But a better example would be to say that, for example, an internal combustion engine can be used in a car and it can also be used in a boat.

I made a few typos in that first comment I made, I would have appreciated the opportunity of fixing them or deleting it completely and starting afresh. C'est la vie. P.S. Why have you not updated your answer? You don't need to radically change anything, it seems that the downvotes are due to the answer not being directly connected to the question, and now with the comments now, that impression will only be exacerbated further.

But my main point on this issue is that usage trumps classification. I can imagine the following circular discussion between English teacher and learner: Teacher: 'You can't say -I went to home-'. Student: 'Why not?' Teacher: 'Because home is an adverb and you can't put a preposition in front of it'. Student: 'How do I know that home is an adverb here?' Teacher: 'Because you can't put a preposition in front of it.'

In my experience learners are not helped by being told that some grammarians say home is an adverb here, others a prepositionless preposition phrase or adverbial or preposition or noun. This is what I was implying in my comment that classification can be 'inconsequential'.