There are eight parts of speech in English: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections. While some parts of speech are more common or versatile than others, they’re all stacked like bricks in a sentence — and you can’t move one without bringing the whole sentence (or wall) down around it. These parts of speech examples demonstrate how each part of speech works, and how they modify or link to each other.
A part of speech is a word with a specific purpose in a sentence. You can categorize every English word into these parts of speech, based on what they do.
For example, nouns are the people, places, and things in a sentence, and verbs are what they do. But while every sentence requires a noun and a verb, those aren’t the only parts of speech you’ll find in writing.
Nouns name a person, place, thing, or idea. They function as the subject or the object of a sentence — the person or thing that either performs the action or receives the action.
Examples of nouns include:
Verbs express action or a state of being. They're what you (or any nouns) do. When you change the verb's tense, you show that an action was done in the past, present, or future.
Examples of verbs include:
Adjectives modify or describe a noun. They typically come before the noun they describe.
Examples of adjectives include:
Pronouns replace nouns to simplify speech and writing. They function as subjects and objects in sentences, just like nouns.
Examples of pronouns include:
Adverbs modify or describe a verb, adjective, or another adverb. They provide information about an action’s time, place, manner, frequency, or degree.
Examples of adverbs include:
Conjunctions connect parts of a sentence. They can join words, phrases, or clauses to add more information to a sentence.
Examples of conjunctions include:
Prepositions show relationships between nouns in a sentence. They show the location of a noun relative to another noun or pronoun.
Examples of prepositions include:
Interjections interrupt sentences to show emotions. You can separate them from a sentence with a comma, period, or exclamation point, depending on the emotion.
Examples of interjections include:
Two additional parts of speech — articles (a, an, the) and determiners (that, my, some) — also appear in sentences. So why are there only eight parts of speech instead of ten?
While some style guides and lists may add articles and determiners to the parts of speech, these parts of speech are technically adjectives. They modify nouns to add specificity to a sentence.
These example sentences show articles and determiners in bold, while the nouns they modify are underlined.
Learning the parts of speech is just the first step to building a proper sentence. But parts of speech are slightly different from parts of a sentence — and you need to know both in order to properly format your writing. Otherwise, you may encounter grammatical errors such as sentence fragments or run-on sentences.
