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Different types of words can be grouped according to what they ‘do’ in their sentence. Some examples of word classes are listed below.
Nouns are by far the largest category of words in English. They signify all kinds of physical things; they also signify imagined things like ‘a ghost’; and ideas or concepts, such as ‘love’, ‘guilt’ or ‘fate’.
Nouns are the words that tell you what things are called. We can separate them simply into 4 groups: person, place, thing or idea.
Concrete nouns are nouns you can experiences with one of your five senses. For example taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight. An abstract noun is an idea, concept or emotion. It is something that you cannot experience through your five senses.
Examples of concrete nouns include:
Examples of abstract nouns include:
Some common nouns are made individual and special by being given a name. These are called proper or naming nouns. They are shown by being given an initial capital letter. People’s names, street addresses, cities, and book titles are all proper nouns, for example:
Sarah had never been to Cornwall before; Monday was going to be her first time.
Pronouns take the place of proper nouns in a sentence.
I
he
she
it
For example:
Mike was tired. = he was tired.
The gift shop was fun. = It was fun.
Pronouns are useful because you do not have to repeat the noun again and again. Look at the following examples:
Sandra was full of news. Sandra had been given a promotion at work. Sandra had also been asked to play for the firm’s five-a-side football team. Sandra had also been thanked for working late to complete a big order.
In this first version, ‘Sandra’ is repeated many times. In the version below, the pronoun ‘she’ has been used to reduce the repetition:
Sandra was full of news. She had been given a promotion at work. She had also been asked to play for the firm’s five-a-side football team. She had also been thanked for working late to complete a big order.
You can go further by cutting out the repeated phrase ‘She had also’, giving a much clearer and more concise sentence, as shown below:
Sandra was full of news. She had been given a promotion at work, been asked to play for the firm’s five-a-side football team and been thanked for working late to complete a big order.
Pronouns can cause confusion if it is unclear who or what they refer to:
Amy accompanied her mother because she was afraid to go alone.
Amy or her mother?
An adjective is a describing word or phrase that adds qualities to a noun. It normally comes before a noun, or after verbs like ‘am’, ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘appears’ or ‘seems’. For example:
She wore a beautiful dress.
He writes meaningless letters.
A verb lies at the heart of a sentence. It describes the action or state of the subject; that is, it is the ‘doing’ or ‘being’ part of the sentence. Verbs are used to signify a physical or mental action:
Muhammad walked through his local park.
She accepted the job offer.
He thought about his stupid mistake in the test.
John visited his friend for a while and then went home.
The dog ran across the yard.
Adverbs give extra detail about many other words apart from nouns. They can add detail to a verb, to an adjective or even to a whole sentence; and, like adjectives, they can be single words or phrases. This makes them a very useful but quite a difficult category to spot. Commonly, an adverb labels how, when or where something happens (and they often end in ‘–ly’):
He spoke softly.
Tom coughed loudly to attract her attention.
She plays the flute beautifully.
Prepositions are short words and phrases that connects a noun, pronoun, or phrase to other words in a sentence. They indicate direction, time, location, and spatial relationships, as well as other abstract types of relationships.
Direction: Look to the left and you’ll see our destination.
Time: We’ve been working since this morning.
Location: We saw a movie at the theater.
Space: The dog hid under the table. On the stroke of six, he walked away.
Here is an example:
The house was on the hill beside a tree.
In this sentence ‘on’ and ‘beside’ are prepositions which show you exactly where the house was.
