It’s amazing to think that every single word in the English language belongs to one of just eight word groups or parts of speech.

A few of these parts of speech are easy to remember – nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Others – and that would be prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections, are a bit more difficult to identify. We will break down each of these 8 parts of speech in separate sections where we will describe how each fits into the structure of a sentence.

The 8 Parts of Speech

Nouns

Common nouns refer to a person, place, or thing.
Examples: student, cellphone, building
Proper nouns refer to a specific person, place, or thing. Proper nouns are capitalized.
Examples: Boston, Lily Allen.

Pronouns

Pronouns take the place of a noun.
Examples: my, me, she, he, his, her.

Verbs

Verbs are action words. They show action or a state of being, as well as whether it took place in the past, present or future.
They whooped and laughed as they hurtled down the ski slope.

Adjectives

Adjectives describe or modify nouns. They say more about the noun, such as specifying size, appearance, quality, quantity, origin, etc.
This tiny, green and pink speckled tropical lizard is very rare.

Adverbs

Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives, as well as other adverbs. They specify how, when, where, and how much something happens.
The children were sleeping next door.

Prepositions

Prepositions show how a noun or pronoun is related to another word in a sentence (into, behind, around, over).
The car stopped close to the elephant by the road.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions join words, phrases, or clauses (and, but, or, nor).
Three of us went to the beach and the rest went cycling.

Interjections

Interjections are exclamations. They are often followed by an exclamation mark (oh, well, wow, cheers, hooray)
“Wow” “Phew”