This study investigates the semantic motivations for the choice of noun as object of the inchoative verb start. Start is known to take idiosyncratic noun collocates, such as engine and fire, among others, and many researchers have investigated what makes it possible for start to take certain nouns with no internal temporal structure as its complement. This study conducts corpus-based research to examine the nouns that occur as the complement of start with high frequency and observes the semantic characters of these nouns using searches in the British National Corpus (BNC). Qualitative analysis of the characteristics of nouns as objects of start show that start prefers to take highly individuated nouns such as engine, family, and job; it was concluded that this semantic preference is generated from the highly transitive nature of start.