style guide: parts of speech

English is made up of parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, verbs and so on. Each word is named according to the work it does in the sentence. Just as with the body or a car, to understand how English works you need to know its parts and how they work together.

For example:

Three mad dogs from Brazil sit quietly along the country road and wait to bite me.

This sentence is made up of these parts:

• nouns – dogs, Brazil, road, me – these name a person, place or thing. Most are things you can picture, but not always, like freedom, beauty and honour. These are abstract nouns.
• adjectives – mad, country – these change the meaning of the noun they are closest to. It was not just dogs that were waiting for me, but mad dogs. And it was not just along any road, but a country road. Notice that country can also be a noun too, as in, “She lives in the country.” Words often have double lives.
• numbers – three – these are like adjectives, but are often considered separately. It includes not just ordinary numbers like three but words like many, few, countless and so on.
• verbs – sit, wait, to bite – almost every sentence has a verb. It is the action of the sentence — what is happening. In this case, sitting, waiting and biting. It is what the nouns are doing or having done to them. In English a verb can often be more than one word long: to sleep, will have slept, going to sleep, am sleeping, and so on.The word is counts as a verb, as in “My dog is blue.” It counts even though not much seems to be happening apart from mere existence.
• adverbs – quietly – these tell you how the verb was done. The dogs did not just wait, they waited quietly. Notice that quietly ends in -ly. A common way to make an adjective into an adverb is to add -ly.
• prepositions – from, along – these show the relation between words, especially in time and place. The dogs are from Brazil and they wait along the road. Some other prepositions: on, of, in, under, between, by, after, before, out of, inside.
• conjunctions – and – these words join sentences or parts of sentences together. They can also join words together into lists: “I love Paris, Athens and Rome.” Some other conjunctions: or, nor, but, yet, because, although, either, if, so that, when, while, even though.
• articles – the – there are only three articles in English: the, a and an. Some languages do not have these, making it one of the harder parts of English to learn.

Nouns and verbs — the actors and the action – are the heart of a sentence. Everything else is just woodwork and paint.

Now take the sentence word by word:

Three	number
mad	adjective
dogs	noun
from	preposition
Brazil	noun
sit	verb
quietly	adverb
along	preposition
the	article
road	noun
and	conjunction
wait	verb
to bite	verb
me	noun

See also:

• style guide
• English