100 words every fourth grader should know - Editors of the American Heritage Di 2014

Guide to parts of speech

The parts of speech are the categories words fall into based on what role they play in the grammar of a sentence. The 100 words featured in this book belong to four parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

NOUNS are words standing for people, places, objects, actions, or ideas. Examples of nouns include acrobat, sofa, tidiness, and freedom. Most nouns are usually singular but can be made plural (acrobats, sofas, and so on). If a noun is usually used in plural form, it is labeled as a PLURAL NOUN.

VERBS describe someone or something as doing something (“Sheep eat grass”), experiencing something (“My sister suffers from allergies”), or being in a particular state (“The pen lay on the table”). A grammatically complete sentence will usually contain at least one verb.

ADJECTIVES help to describe nouns by naming a quality of the person, place, or thing that the noun refers to. Examples of adjectives include long and dark in the phrase “a long, dark tunnel.”

ADVERBS often describe the action in verbs by telling in what way something is done: “The waiter sadly informed us that the chowder was no longer available.” They can also modify the meaning of an adjective: “an incredibly long, dark tunnel.”

In addition to these four parts of speech, there are several other parts of speech that you ought to know about: pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and interjections. None of these parts of speech appear among the 100 words featured in this book because most of the words belonging to these parts of speech are very basic words that are already familiar to you, even if you don’t know what grammatical category they belong to.

PRONOUNS, such as she, it, and themselves, stand for nouns and play the same role nouns do in the grammar of a sentence.

PREPOSITIONS, such as in, through, and with, help to explain the relationship of a noun or verb to another noun. The relationship indicated by a preposition often but not always has to do with space (“the coats in the closet”) or time (“slept through the night”).

CONJUNCTIONS, such as but and because, help to join the parts of a sentence to each other.

ARTICLES, such as an and the, introduce nouns and tell whether the noun in question is general (“a heavy bookbag”) or specific (“the heaviest bookbag in the world”).

INTERJECTIONS, such as yippee and hey, don’t play a role in the grammar of a sentence at all; they just express an emotion.