The word the is what part of speech

Parts of Speech Review

As a reminder, let's first look at some parts of speech and their role in a sentence.

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. This means that ''cat,'' ''garage,'' ''table,'' and ''sympathy'' can all be classified as nouns. Every sentence needs a noun to serve as the subject of the sentence.

A verb is an action word like ''run,'' ''dance,'' and ''organize.'' Verbs can also be verbs of being like ''is'' and ''are.'' Every sentence needs a verb along with a subject to form a complete thought.

An adjective is a word of description that tells us something more about a noun. In English, adjectives usually appear right before the noun they modify. ''Green,'' ''talented,'' and ''terrible'' are all adjectives.

An adverb adds additional information to a verb, adjective, or another adverb. The information provided by an adverb tells us how, when, where, or to what extent. ''Lightly dance,'' ''really terrible,'' and ''barely there'' all involve the use of adverbs.

Adding a Suffix

Now, let's try using one of the nouns we mentioned: ''sympathy.'' This word is an idea, or a concept noun. If we replace the ''-y'' with ''-ize,'' we get ''sympathize,'' which is a verb. Here's a sentence:

• ''I sympathize with Sam on the loss of his dog.''

We can change the word again in a different way and create a different kind of noun, a person. Let's use ''sympathizer'' in a sentence, like this:

• ''She is a sympathizer with the cause of prison reform.''

Can we change the root word again? Yes, we can. We can add an ''-ing'' to get the word ''sympathizing,'' which can be a verb or an adjective. Now that sounds a bit confusing. Here are two sentences as illustration:

• ''I can tell from the expression on your face that you're sympathizing with Sam because his dog ran away.''
• ''Sam appreciated my sympathizing attitude when I went by his house this afternoon.''

To examine the changes we need to do to make nouns, let's try another word, but this time let's keep the root and change the suffix. This time, try to find a pattern in the type of suffix used for each type of transformation.

This time, let's start with the root word ''arrange.'' You can arrange flowers in a vase or arrange for a doctor's appointment next week. Let's say you arrange a bunch of flowers into a beautiful pattern in a vase. What do you have when you're finished? You have created an ''arrangement.'' By adding the suffix ''-ment,'' we created a noun form, a thing.

Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.

Each part of speech explains not what the word is, but how the word is used. In fact, the same word can be a noun in one sentence and a verb or adjective in the next. The next few examples show how a word's part of speech can change from one sentence to the next, and following them is a series of sections on the individual parts of speech, followed by an exercise.

In this sentence, "books" is a noun, the subject of the sentence.

Here "books" is a verb, and its subject is "Bridget."

In this sentence, "walk" is a verb, and its subject is the pronoun "we."

In this example, "walk" is a noun, which is part of a prepositional phrase describing where the mail carrier stood.

Here "jail" is a noun, which is the object of the infinitive phrase "to build."

Here "jail" is part of the compound verb "would jail."

In this sentence, "cries" is a noun acting as the direct object of the verb "heard."

But here "cries" is a verb that describes the actions of the subject of the sentence, the baby.

The next few sections explain each of the parts of speech in detail. When you have finished, you might want to test yourself by trying the exercise.

Written by Heather MacFadyen

For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

What are the parts of speech in a sentence?

What part of speech is “the”?

What parts of speech do new words come from?

What part of speech is the adverb?

Is the an adjective?

What kind of verb is the is?

What is the in grammar?