The 9 Parts of Speech

First of all, what is a part of speech? Grammarians have devised a system to sort every word in the English language into nine categories. We call those categories parts of speech.

The first part of speech is the noun. A noun is usually defined as a "person, place, or thing," but events, qualities, and abstract concepts are also nouns. Due to the many intricacies of this seemingly simple part of speech, we decided to make a separate article about nouns. The subject of a sentence is most often a noun.

The second part of speech is the verb. A verb is a word that describes an action, occurrence, or state of being. There are many different verb tenses, although the simplest ones are past, present, and future. You can read more about verbs and verb tenses here.

The third part of speech is the adjective. Adjectives are words that modify nouns. They describe a quality, such as color, size, shape, or number.

The fourth part of speech is the adverb, which is similar to an adjective, except instead of modifying nouns, it modifies verbs (or adjectives, or other adverbs).

The fifth part of speech is the pronoun, a word used in place of a noun to avoid repetitiveness in speaking and writing.

The sixth part of speech is the conjunction. Conjunctions are used to connect simple sentences and create compound sentences.

The seventh part of speech is the preposition. A preposition indicates things such as location, direction, or time. Prepositions can also be used to introduce objects.

The eighth part of speech is the interjection, which serves no true grammatical function but is used to express emotion. Words such as "Hey!" and "Ack!" are interjections, although we at thewordiswhom.com prefer the less common "Salutations!" and "Fermions!"

The ninth and final part of speech is the article. Some linguists do not count this as a true part of speech because only three words fit into this category, and one could argue that they could instead be classified as adjectives. The three English articles are "a," "an," and "the." Articles are placed before nouns, specifically singular countable nouns, and convey the noun's level of specificity. Despite the controversy surrounding them, articles are in fact quite necessary. In a sentence like "I own sheep," where the noun "sheep" is the same in its singular and plural forms, things would get very ambiguous very quickly without articles—"I own sheep" and "I own a sheep" mean quite different things. 

We hope that you enjoyed this article (no, not that kind of article!) and that you learned something! Valedictions!