Word Explorer
Function word
A word that has little meaning when standing alone, but instead serves to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker, such as prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, or conjunctions.
📖 Definitions of "Function word"
noun
- 1
A word that has little meaning when standing alone, but instead serves to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker, such as prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, or conjunctions.
💡 Words with a Similar Meaning to "Function word"
Found via reverse dictionary — words that share a conceptual meaning.
| Word | Definition |
|---|---|
| closed-class wordnoun | a word that is uninflected and serves a grammatical function but has little identifiable meaning |
| metawordnoun | A word, such as a search keyword or dictionary headword, that stands for itself as a word rather than having a meaning and a context. |
| wordnoun | (semantics) The smallest unit of language that has a particular meaning and can be expressed by itself; the smallest discrete, meaningful unit of language. (contrast morpheme.) |
| reserved wordnoun | (programming) A string of characters that is a verb, command, or other part of a programming language, and therefore cannot be used as the name of a variable, constant, function, or procedure. |
| semiwordnoun | (linguistics) The initial or final constituent of compounds that cannot occur outside the domain of compounds, i.e., they are not freely combinable with words or phrases into syntactic constituents, but can undergo coordination reduction in both directions. |
| dummynoun | A stupid person. |
| phrasenoun | A short written or spoken expression. |
| woidnoun | Pronunciation spelling of word. [(semantics) The smallest unit of language that has a particular meaning and can be expressed by itself; the smallest discrete, meaningful unit of language. (contrast morpheme.)] |
| nounnoun | (grammar, strictly) A word that functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as person, animal, place, word, thing, phenomenon, substance, quality, or idea: one of the basic parts of speech in many languages, including English. |
| free morphemenoun | (linguistic morphology) A morpheme that can carry meaning on its own, and does not require a prefix, suffix, or infix to give it meaning. |
| workwordnoun | (rare) The operative word, especially in a thought, phrase, or idea; keyword. |
| operative wordnoun | The key word in a sentence. |
| book wordnoun | (linguistics) A word that is encountered in writing but not usually in speech, which people may therefore not know how to pronounce (correctly). |
| bywordnoun | A proverb or proverbial expression, common saying; a frequently used word or phrase. |
| particlenoun | A very small piece of matter, a fragment; especially, the smallest possible part of something. |
| basewordnoun | (linguistics) A word used as a base, to whose stem affixes are added, forming new words. |
| wordletnoun | (rare) A little word, or part of a word. |
| qualifiernoun | One who qualifies for something, especially a contestant who qualifies for a stage in a competition. |
| lemmanoun | (linguistics, lexicography) The canonical form of an inflected word; i.e., the form usually found as the headword in a dictionary, such as the nominative singular of a noun, the bare infinitive of a verb, etc. |
| multi-word expressionnoun | (linguistics) A lexeme-like unit made up of a sequence of two or more words that has properties that are not predictable from the properties of the individual words or their normal mode of combination, such as an idiom ("pay the piper"), a phrasal noun ("steam iron"), a phrasal preposition ("in front of"), or a phrasal verb ("buy off"). |
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