Parts of Speech
In grammar, a part of speech (also a word class, a lexical class, or a lexical category) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behavior of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all.
A words have been traditionally classified into eight lexical categories, or parts of speech (and are still done so in most dictionaries):
- Noun: any abstract or concrete entity
- Pronoun: any substitute for a noun or noun phrase
- Adjective: any qualifier of a noun
- Verb: any action or state of being
- Adverb: any qualifier of an adjective, verb, or other adverb
- Preposition: any establisher of relation and syntactic context
- Conjunction: any syntactic connector
- Interjection: any emotional greeting (or “exclamation”)
Parts of Speech Table
This is a summary of the 8 parts of speech*.
| part of speech | function or “job” | example words | example sentences |
| Verb | action or state | (to) be, have, do, like, work, sing, can, must | EnglishClub.com is a web site. I like EnglishClub.com. |
| Noun | thing or person | pen, dog, work, music, town,London, teacher, John | This is my dog. He lives in my house. We live in London. |
| Adjective | describes a noun | a/an, the, 69, some, good, big, red, well, interesting | My dog is big. I like big dogs. |
| Adverb | describes a verb, adjective or adverb | quickly, silently, well, badly, very, really | My dog eats quickly. When he is very hungry, he eats really quickly. |
| Pronoun | replaces a noun | I, you, he, she, some | Tarais Indian. She is beautiful. |
| Preposition | links a noun to another word | to, at, after, on, but | We went to school on Monday. |
| Conjunction | joins clauses or sentences or words | and, but, when | I like dogs and I like cats. I like cats and dogs. I like dogs but I don’t like cats. |
| Interjection | short exclamation, sometimes inserted into a sentence | oh!, ouch!, hi!, well | Ouch! That hurts! Hi! How are you? Well, I don’t know |
