Every word is a part of speech. The term “Parts of Speech” refers to the role word plays in a sentence. And like any workplace or TV show with an ensemble cast, these roles were designed to work together. Read on to learn about the different parts of speech that the words we use every day fall into, and how we use them together to communicate ideas clearly. In every language we find groups of words that share grammatical characteristics. These groups are called “parts of speech,” and we examine them in this chapter and the next. Though many writers on language refer to “the eight parts of speech” (e.g., Weaver 1996: 254), the actual number of parts of speech we need to recognize in a language is determined by how fine-grained our analysis of the language is—the more finegrained, the greater the number of parts of speech that will be distinguished. In this book we distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (the major parts of speech), and pronouns, wh-words, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, intensifiers, conjunctions, and particles (the minor parts of speech). Every literate person needs at least a minimal understanding of parts of speech in order to be able to use such commonplace items as dictionaries and thesauruses, which classify words according to their parts (and sub-parts) of speech. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition, p. xxxi) distinguishes adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, definite articles, indefinite articles, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs. It also distinguishes transitive, intransitive,