50 Fun Facts About Parts of Speech

Which horror novelist's writing memoir declares that the road to hell is paved with adverbs?

Stephen King made the claim in On Writing, adding that he would shout it from the rooftops. The 2000 book is half autobiography, half guide to the craft.

Which American humorist wrote the maxim 'As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out'?

Mark Twain put the line in Pudd'nhead Wilson, where every chapter opens with sayings from the title character's calendar. The townsfolk take the calendar as proof that Wilson is a fool.

Which European language capitalises every noun, not just the names of people and places?

German capitalises all nouns, so 'the house' is written 'das Haus'. Danish followed the same rule until a spelling reform abolished it in 1948.

Which company's name entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb in 2006, against its owners' wishes?

Google entered the dictionary as a verb on June 15, 2006. The company has discouraged the usage, fearing its trademark could turn into a generic word for any web search.

Which word game by Leonard Stern and Roger Price labels its blanks 'noun', 'verb' and so on?

Mad Libs went unnamed for five years, until its creators overheard an actor in a New York restaurant say he wanted to 'ad-lib' an interview.

Which cartoon characters, created by the Belgian artist Peyo, swap nouns and verbs for their own name?

The Smurfs say things like 'We're going smurfing on the River Smurf today'. Peyo invented the original French word, schtroumpf, at a meal when he could not remember the word for salt.

Which TV franchise opens with the classic split infinitive, an adverb wedged between 'to' and 'go'?

Star Trek opens with a promise 'to boldly go', which parks 'boldly' inside the infinitive. Grammarians once ruled that an adverb must never sit between 'to' and its verb.

Which American city's name, repeated eight times in a row, makes a grammatical English sentence?

Buffalo fills three roles in the sentence: the city, the animal and a verb meaning to outwit or intimidate. Steven Pinker featured it in his book The Language Instinct.

Which Lewis Carroll poem keeps normal English syntax while inventing words like 'slithy' and 'toves'?

Jabberwocky keeps English syntax and verse forms, so readers sense that 'slithy' describes the 'toves' without knowing either word. Humpty Dumpty later explains slithy as 'lithe and slimy'.

Which Saturday-morning ABC series taught children grammar with the song 'Conjunction Junction'?

Schoolhouse Rock gave its second season, Grammar Rock, to nouns, verbs, adjectives and the other word types. The animated shorts ran between the network's cartoons from 1973.

Which word in the title of the time-travel film 'Back to the Future' is a preposition?

To is a preposition here, pointing toward a destination. Put the same word in front of a verb, as in 'to go', and it becomes the marker of the infinitive instead.

Which of these is a collective noun, the kind British English often pairs with a plural verb?

Team is a collective noun, one word for a whole group, so Britons can say 'the team have finished' and mean its members. American English almost always keeps the verb singular.

Which pronoun is the object form of 'who', as in the letter opening 'To ___ It May Concern'?

Whom is the objective form of who, though plain 'who' has long replaced it in informal English. One linguist blames its decline on its being a rare inflected leftover in modern grammar.

Which of these is a coordinating conjunction, one of the seven words in the FANBOYS mnemonic?

Nor is the N in FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. When, than and since are subordinating conjunctions, which open a clause that cannot stand alone.

Which of these words ending in -ly is an adjective, although most -ly words are adverbs?

Lonely is an adjective, like lively and ugly, despite its -ly ending. Such words have no neat adverb form, so English falls back on phrases like 'in a silly way'.

Which term names an -ing verb form doing a noun's job, like 'playing' in 'Playing chess is fun'?

A gerund names the activity itself, so it can be the subject of a sentence. In 'the boys playing chess' the same -ing form is traditionally labelled a participle, because it describes the boys.

Which of these is a modal verb, a helper that never takes an -s ending in the third person?

Might is a modal verb, alongside can, could, may, must, shall, should, will and would. Modals also lack participles, so nobody has ever been caught 'mighting'.

Which of these is a mass noun, a word that normally has no plural and cannot follow 'a'?

Furniture is a mass noun: seven chairs can be counted, but they add up to 'furniture', never 'furnitures'. The pea went the other way, split off from the Middle English mass noun pease.

Which of these is a reflexive pronoun, the kind that points back to the subject of its own clause?

Myself is a reflexive pronoun, as in 'I taught myself'. Informal speech also slips it in where plain 'me' would do, as in 'She stood by Jane and myself'.

Which word is the superlative of the adjective 'bad', one step beyond its comparative form?

Worst is the superlative of bad, and worse the comparative. Linguists call such unrelated-looking sets suppletive, the same pattern seen in good, better, best.

Which word in the title of the Leonardo DiCaprio film 'Catch Me If You Can' is a conjunction?

If is a subordinating conjunction: it hooks the dare 'catch me' to the condition 'you can'. 'Can' is a modal verb, while 'me' and 'you' are pronouns.

Which word in the title of the magician heist film 'Now You See Me' is an adverb?

Now is most commonly an adverb of time, here telling when the seeing happens. 'You' and 'me' are both pronouns, and 'see' is the verb they share.

Which word in the title of the Coen brothers' film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' is a verb?

Art is the old second-person singular of 'be', the form that goes with 'thou'. The title comes from the 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels, whose director hero wants to film a book of that name.

Which of these is a noun when its first syllable is stressed and a verb when its second is?

Permit follows a pattern shared by record, rebel and conduct: English moves the stress to the first syllable when such verbs are used as nouns.

Which term names the word a pronoun refers back to, like 'Maria' in 'Maria lost her keys'?

The antecedent usually comes first, but in 'When she arrived, Maria sat down' it trails its pronoun. Strictly speaking, it is then a postcedent.

Which comic strip coined the line 'Verbing weirds language' in a joke about turning nouns into verbs?

Calvin and Hobbes ended a strip on the habit with that punchline, which practises what it mocks: both 'verb' and 'weird' are pressed into service as verbs.

Which linguist wrote 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' as a grammatical sentence with no meaning?

Noam Chomsky composed it for his 1957 book Syntactic Structures. Two adjectives, a noun, a verb and an adverb sit in perfectly legal order while the meaning collapses.

Which prime minister is doubtfully credited with the preposition-mocking quip 'up with which I will not put'?

Winston Churchill gets the credit, though the attribution is apocryphal. The ban on ending a sentence with a preposition caught on after the poet John Dryden attacked the habit in 1672.

Which constructed language, first published in 1887, ends every common noun in -o and every adjective in -a?

Esperanto wears its grammar on its sleeve: derived adverbs end in -e as well, so a reader can tell what job a word does before knowing what it means.

Which pronoun did the American Dialect Society crown Word of the Decade for the 2010s?

They won for its use as a singular pronoun for nonbinary people. Merriam-Webster had already named it Word of the Year for 2019.

Which animal stars in the 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' joke, where a stray comma turns two nouns into verbs?

A panda eats shoots and leaves. In the joke, a badly punctuated wildlife manual has it eat a sandwich, fire two shots in the air and walk out of the café.

Which of these terms names a part of a sentence rather than one of the traditional parts of speech?

A predicate is everything in a statement except its subject, so it names a job that a group of words does. Pronoun, preposition and conjunction each classify single words.

Which linguistic term names turning a noun into a verb with no change of form, as in 'to email'?

Conversion is also called zero derivation, because the word switches its part of speech without gaining any ending. Slang does it freely, as in 'beer me' for 'give me a beer'.

Which type of conjunction works in matched pairs, such as 'either…or' and 'both…and'?

Correlative conjunctions split into two halves that bracket what they join, as in 'She's either a singer or an actress'. Other pairs include 'neither…nor' and 'whether…or'.

Which of these is a conjunctive adverb, usually set after a semicolon when it joins two clauses?

However is a conjunctive adverb, like furthermore and moreover. Using one with only a comma between two complete clauses is a classic cause of the comma splice.

Which term describes a verb that needs an object, like 'enjoys' in 'Amadeus enjoys music'?

Transitive verbs pass their action on to an object, while intransitive ones such as 'arose' take none. A verb like 'give' is ditransitive, because it takes two objects at once.

Which word class, named by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, groups 'the', 'this', 'my' and 'many' together?

Determiners got their name in 1933, after Bloomfield observed that English nouns often require a qualifying word in front. The class takes in articles, demonstratives, possessives and quantifiers.

Which word can be five parts of speech, from a noun in boxing to a preposition in 'sail ___ the world'?

Round is a noun in boxing, a verb when ships round a cape, an adjective in 'round table', and both adverb and preposition in 'turn round' and 'round the corner'.

Which kind of pun, named after the hero of a juvenile adventure book series, hinges on a punning adverb?

A Tom Swifty ties a quoted line to the way it is said: "We must hurry," said Tom swiftly. The books it parodies went to great lengths to avoid a plain 'said'.

Which formal term do grammars use for a 'helping verb' such as 'have' in 'I have finished'?

An auxiliary verb lends grammatical help to a main verb: in 'I have finished my lunch', 'have' marks the perfect aspect. Linguists pick the class out by tests such as taking 'not' directly.

In the garden-path sentence 'The old man the boat', which word turns out to be the verb?

Man is the verb here, meaning to crew: the old are the ones who man the boat. Readers trip because 'the old man' looks like the familiar pattern of article, adjective, noun.

Which Greek scholar is credited with the ancient grammar handbook that sorted words into eight classes?

Dionysius Thrax gave the participle and the article classes of their own, while adjectives were simply filed under the noun. The scheme dates from the 2nd century BCE.

Which ancient language did the grammarian Yāska sort into four word classes in a treatise called the Nirukta?

Sanskrit got four classes in the Nirukta: nouns, verbs, prefixes and particles. The four fall into two larger groups: words that inflect and words that do not.

Which Greek philosopher wrote in his dialogue Cratylus that sentences are a combination of verbs and nouns?

Plato stopped at those two classes. Aristotle then added a third, the conjunction, which covered far more kinds of word than the label does now.

Which language's lack of articles led its grammarians to drop that class and add the interjection?

Latin has no articles, so Roman grammarians swapped the Greek article class for the interjection, keeping the tally of word classes at eight. Quintilian was already describing the trade in the 1st century CE.

Which label do linguists give word classes, like pronouns, that almost never admit new members?

Closed classes are small and mostly do grammatical work, while open classes such as nouns, verbs and adjectives acquire new members constantly.

Which kind of adverb, like 'slow' in 'drive slow', has the same form as its adjective and skips the -ly?

Flat adverbs were once quite common before their -ly rivals largely replaced them. Survivors include 'drive safe' and 'dress smart'.

Which kind of pronoun is the 'it' in 'It rained', a word that refers to nothing at all?

A dummy pronoun refers to nothing and exists only to fill the subject slot that English grammar demands. Its other name, expletive pronoun, has nothing to do with swearing.

Which umbrella term covers prepositions and the postpositions that follow their nouns in Turkish?

Adposition covers prepositions, which precede their complement, and postpositions, which follow it. English has a few of the second kind, such as 'ago' in 'three days ago'.

Which term do grammarians use for a noun like 'scissors' or 'trousers' that has no singular form?

Plurale tantum means 'plural only'. In English such nouns usually name things that work as pairs or sets, which is why spectacles and pants behave the same way.