Grammatical Terms

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Glossary of Grammatical Terms

Learning grammatical terms is essential to take your language study or writing skills to the next level. If you're learning a foreign language in a classroom setting, then you must know the grammatical terms so you and your tutor can discuss language structures efficiently. If you're looking to improve your writing, then you must know the grammatical terms to remove the guesswork from aspects such as punctuation, sentence structure, and capitalization.

For example, to use commas accurately, you must understand dependent clauses, independent clauses, conjunctions, interjections, the vocative case, cumulative adjectives, parenthesis, and apposition. If you don't understand those terms, you are flying by the seat of your pants regarding commas.

Basic Grammar Terms

Here are the nine principal parts of speech (also called "word classes").

• adjectives
• adverbs
• conjunctions
• determiners
• interjections
• nouns
• prepositions
• prepositions of place (at, on, in)
• prepositions of time (at, on, in)
• pronouns
• verbs

The lessons and videos above are deliberately detailed as they are intended for teachers or advanced learners. (In the glossary below, there are simpler versions of these lessons, annotated "for kids.")

Introduction to the Nine Parts of Speech

This lesson with the accompanying video is a helpful, simplified introduction to the nine parts of speech.

• 9 parts of speech

A-Z Glossary

This A-Z list of grammatical terms provides links to the explanations of the meanings. Each entry has a link to a lesson that includes example sentences as well as a printable and sendable test. Many of the entries have a video icon, which is a link to a video tutorial on our YouTube channel.