Word class

The term word class is often used for the classification of lexemes into the morphosyntactically most important classes noun, verb, adjective, adposition, adverb, and so on.

Subtypes

(traditional word classes:)

• noun
• verb
• adjective
• adposition (preposition, postposition)
• adverb
• interjection

(the following have traditionally been considered as word classes, but are often not considered word classes by modern linguists:)

• pronoun
• numeral
• conjunction

(other categories of lexemes that are sometimes regarded as word classes:)

• particle
• auxiliary verb
• complementizer

Synonyms

• part of speech (this is the old term)
• syntactic category (this is a term from the 1960s generative tradition)
• lexical category (this is a term from the 1990s generative tradition)

Other languages

German Wortklasse Portuguese classe de palavras