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. There are many subcategories of noun, so many that we decided to make a separate article about them! 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,

The sixth part of speech is the conjunction,

The seventh part of speech is the preposition,

The eighth part of speech is the interjection,

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!