Parts of Speech Examples
Here are some sentences made with different English parts of speech:
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| pronoun | verb | preposition | adjective | noun | adverb |
| She | ran | to | the | station | quickly. |
| pron. | verb | adj. | noun | conjunction | pron. | verb | pron. |
| She | likes | big | snakes | but | I | hate | them. |
Here is a sentence that contains every part of speech:
| interjection | pron. | conj. | adj. | noun | verb | prep. | noun | adverb |
| Well, | she | and | young | John | walk | to | school | slowly. |
Words with More than One Job
Many words in English can have more than one job, or be more than one part of speech. For example, "work" can be a verb and a noun; "but" can be a conjunction and a preposition; "well" can be an adjective, an adverb and an interjection. In addition, many nouns can act as adjectives.
To analyze the part of speech, ask yourself: "What job is this word doing in this sentence?"
In the table below you can see a few examples. Of course, there are more, even for some of the words in the table. In fact, if you look in a good dictionary you will see that the word but has six jobs to do:
verb, noun, adverb, pronoun, preposition and conjuction!
| word | part of speech | example |
| work | noun | My work is easy. |
| verb | I work in London. | |
| but | conjunction | John came but Mary didn't come. |
| preposition | Everyone came but Mary. | |
| well | adjective | Are you well? |
| adverb | She speaks well. | |
| interjection | Well! That's expensive! | |
| afternoon | noun | We ate in the afternoon. |
| noun acting as adjective | We had afternoon tea. |