15 Grammar Terms You Should Know

1. Adjective

An adjective is a word that describes a noun. For example, in ‘She is a beautiful girl’, the adjective beautiful describes the noun girl.

2. Adverb

An adverb is a word used to say something about a verb. Examples are: kindly, gently, softly, carefully, hastily, rightly etc. An adverb usually refers to the manner, time or place of an action. An adverb can also be used to describe an adjective or another adverb.

3. Articles

Articles are the little words a, an and the. They are used with nouns.

I read a story.
This is a cat.
She is an engineer.
Look at the sky.

4. Clause

A clause is a group of words which has a subject and predicate of its own and which makes complete sense.

5. Conjunction

A conjunction is a joining word. Examples are: and, but, or, because, however, after, when, before etc. It can join two words, phrases or sentences.

Bread and butter
The boy and the girl
My brother likes cricket but I like football.
You can have tea or coffee.

6. Noun

A noun is the name of a person, place, animal or thing. Examples are: flower, Susie, India, dog, tree, boys, garden, bird etc.

7. Plural

A noun is said to be plural or in the plural form if it refers to more than one person, place, animal or thing. Examples are: birds, animals, flowers, boys, books, pens etc.

8. Possessive

The possessive form of a noun is one which indicates possession. For example, in ‘Peter’s house’, Peter’s is in the possessive form. The possessive form of a noun is formed by putting a raised comma (’) at the end of the noun and adding the letter s.

Pronouns, too, have possessive forms. Examples are: my, our, his, her, your, their and its.

9. Preposition

A preposition shows the relation between two words in a sentence. For example, in the sentence ‘The ball is in the basket’, the preposition ‘in’ shows the relation between the words basket and ball.

10. Pronoun

A pronoun usually stands for, or replaces a noun. The pronouns he, she, it and they are of this type. Some pronouns do not replace or stand for any noun. The pronoun I stands for the speaker and the pronoun you stands for the person spoken to.

11. Proper noun

A proper noun is the special name of a person (John, Mary), a country (India, France, Mumbai), a place (library, church), a river (the Nile), an ocean (the Pacific Ocean), a mountain (Mount Everest), a day (Monday), a month (January) etc. A proper noun always begins with a capital letter.

12. Phrase

A phrase is a group of words which makes sense, but not complete sense. Examples are: in the corner, with care and his house.

13. Sentence

A sentence is a group of words which makes complete sense. A sentence has a subject and a predicate of its own. In writing, a sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark.

Examples are:

Sun rises in the east.
She is my friend.
Who is she?
How beautiful!

14. Singular

A noun is said to be singular or in the singular form if it refers to one person, place, animal or thing. For example, the nouns boy, school, pen and cow are in the singular form.

15. Verb

A verb is an action word. It indicates an action. Examples are: cut, make, break, speak, write, work etc.