In First Writing you met naming words (nouns), action words (verbs) and describing words. Grammar gives every word in a sentence a name for the job it does. These jobs are called the parts of speech.
| Part of speech | Its job | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| noun | names a person, place, thing or idea | girl, Ohio, kite, courage |
| pronoun | stands in for a noun | she, it, they, someone |
| verb | shows an action or a state of being | run, paint, is, seems |
| adjective | describes a noun or pronoun | red, tall, three, the |
| adverb | tells how, when, where or how much | quickly, soon, here, very |
| preposition | links a noun to another word | in, on, after, with |
| conjunction | joins words or groups of words | and, but, because |
| interjection | shows feeling, apart from the rest | wow, oh, oops |
Key idea
A word’s part of speech is the job it does in its sentence. To name it, ask what the word is doing here.
Why it works
Naming the jobs lets us talk about sentences: why one is unclear, where a comma goes, why a verb must change. Every later topic in this course, from subjects to diagrams, uses these eight names.
Worked example: Name the jobs
What part of speech is each word in “Leo carefully painted the old fence”?
- Leo names a person: noun.
- painted shows the action: verb.
- carefully tells how he painted: adverb.
- old describes the fence: adjective. The is an adjective too (an article).
- fence names a thing: noun.
Answer: noun, adverb, verb, adjective, adjective, noun
Worked example: The same word, two jobs
What part of speech is run in “We run every morning” and in “Dad went for a long run”?
- In the first sentence, run is what we do: a verb.
- In the second, a long comes before it and it names a thing Dad went for: a noun.
Answer: verb, then noun
Common mistake
Memorizing lists (“run is a verb”) and labeling words without looking at the sentence. Many words can do more than one job. Check the job: does the word name, act, describe, tell how, link, join, stand in for a noun, or show feeling?
Grammar books don’t all count the same way. The eight above are the traditional list, used by older books such as Reed and Kellogg’s Higher Lessons in English and by many schools. Some modern books add articles or determiners (a, the, this, my) as a ninth group. This course calls a, an and the adjectives, as the traditional list does. For more practice in the old style, see the site’s Mother Tongue and Harvey’s grammar pages.