Words may be divided into the following major word classes:
Word class Examples
Word class Examples
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Nouns brother, child, China, ecolgy, James, tree
Main verbs break, consider, destroy, eat, sing, talk
Adjectives angry, cold, foolish, happy, tidy, young
Adverbs carefully, gradually, happily, slowly
Pronouns I, me, my, you, he, his, her, we, our
Auxiliary verbs can, could, do, may, might, will, would
Prepositions after, at, for, in, of, over, with, without
Conjunctions although, and, because, but, or, when
Articles a, an, theـ
Numerals one, two, twenty, first, second, third
Some word classes are open, that is, they admit new words as members as the need arises. The major open classes are the first two above – nouns and main verbs. The class of nouns is potentially infinite, since it is continually being expanded as new discoveries are made, new products are developed and new ideas are explored. In recent years, for example, developments
in computer technology have given rise to many new nouns,
including:
bitmap modem
CD-ROM multimedia
dotcom newsgroup
e-commerce pixel
e-mail voicemail
Internet website
laptop
These developments have also given rise to some new verbs:
download right-click
upload double-click
reboot
The adjective and adverb classes also admit new members from time to time, though far less prolifically than the class of nouns. The class of numerals is open, since we can always add 1 to a number to make a new number.
In contrast with this, prepositions, for instance, belong to a closed word class. We never invent new prepositions (words like after, at, before, in,with) simply because we never need them.
Word class Examples
Word class Examples
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Nouns brother, child, China, ecolgy, James, tree
Main verbs break, consider, destroy, eat, sing, talk
Adjectives angry, cold, foolish, happy, tidy, young
Adverbs carefully, gradually, happily, slowly
Pronouns I, me, my, you, he, his, her, we, our
Auxiliary verbs can, could, do, may, might, will, would
Prepositions after, at, for, in, of, over, with, without
Conjunctions although, and, because, but, or, when
Articles a, an, theـ
Numerals one, two, twenty, first, second, third
Some word classes are open, that is, they admit new words as members as the need arises. The major open classes are the first two above – nouns and main verbs. The class of nouns is potentially infinite, since it is continually being expanded as new discoveries are made, new products are developed and new ideas are explored. In recent years, for example, developments
in computer technology have given rise to many new nouns,
including:
bitmap modem
CD-ROM multimedia
dotcom newsgroup
e-commerce pixel
e-mail voicemail
Internet website
laptop
These developments have also given rise to some new verbs:
download right-click
upload double-click
reboot
The adjective and adverb classes also admit new members from time to time, though far less prolifically than the class of nouns. The class of numerals is open, since we can always add 1 to a number to make a new number.
