Appendix:Glossary

Welcome to the glossary!

A

adjective

A word like big or childish that usually serves to modify a noun.

antonym

A word with a meaning that is the opposite of a meaning of another word. For example, good is an antonym of bad. Contrast synonym.

C

conjugation

The inflection of verbs. See also declension.

countable

Describes a noun which can be freely used with the indefinite article (a or an in English) and with numbers, and which therefore has a plural form. Antonym: uncountable or mass noun.

D

declension

The inflection of nouns and words like them, or used together with them (i.e. nominals). See also conjugation.

G

gender

A way of classifying nouns in some languages. In such languages, each noun has a specific gender (often determined by its meaning and/or form), and other words (especially adjectives and pronouns) will often change form to agree with the noun's gender. See also noun class.

I

indefinite

Refers to forms of words that present something as not yet identified or not immediately identifiable; in English, this is the basic meaning of the article a; in some languages, this is a nominal or adjectival inflection.

inflection

The change in form of a word to represent various grammatical categories, such as tense (e.g. past tense, present tense, future tense) or number (e.g. singular, plural). For example, the verb run may be inflected to produce runs, ran, and running'. In highly inflected languages, such as Latin, there will be many more forms. Two major types of inflection are conjugation (inflection of verbs) and declension (inflection of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns).

M

masculine

Belonging to the male grammatical gender, in languages that have gender distinctions.

N

nominal

Related to nouns. See also denominal.

As a noun, it refers to any part of speech that is noun-like in some way, and normally includes nouns themselves along with adjectives, pronouns and determiners. The inflection of nominals is commonly called declension.

noun

A word that refers to a person (such as an actress), a place, a physical thing (such as wood), or concept (such as beauty, joy, or time). See also countable, uncountable and plural.

P

part of speech

The category that a word belongs to, with respect to how it's used as part of phrases and sentences. Examples are nouns, adjectives and verbs. The part of speech is inherent in the word itself, and is independent of any specific role that the word may have within any given sentence (e.g. subject, direct object). Words may belong to more than one part of speech: English this is both a determiner and a pronoun, while coat is both a noun and a verb.

pronoun

A part of speech that acts as a substitute for a noun or noun phrase and refers to a topic of the discussion. Pronouns can refer to a participant in the discussion and can be used instead of a person's name, such as with the pronouns I and you. Other pronouns, such as he, she, and it, can be used to refer to other people or objects that have already been mentioned without repeating their names.

S

synonym

A word or phrase with a meaning that is the same as, or very similar to, another word or phrase. Contrast antonym.

U

uncountable

A noun that cannot be used freely with numbers or the indefinite article, and which therefore usually takes no plural form. For example, the English noun information is a mass noun, and at least in its principal senses is uncountable in most varieties of English. For those senses, we cannot say that we have *one information, nor that we have *many information (or *many informations). Many mass noun senses often have corresponding plural count senses that denote types of the mass sense, instances of the mass sense, or portions (servings) of the mass sense. For example, the main sense of butter is the uncountable sense, so the plural form butters is seldom used, although it occasionally is used to mean "types of butter" (many herb butters contain garlic) or "[packets of] butter". Compare also other implicit references to a container and the portion/serving that it contains (get me a water, order two sodas, have a few beers). Many languages do not distinguish between countable and uncountable nouns. Antonym: countable or count noun.