Types of word – Grouping different word classes
Now that we’re familiar with the different types of words that exist in the English language, it can be useful to understand how they’re often classified into two groups – major words and minor words.
Major/content/lexical (or open) word class
There are five types of words included in the major (often referred to as “lexical” or “open”) class.
Major (open) words types:
- Verbs
- Nouns
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Interjections
They are termed major, content, or lexical because they carry most of the content or meaning of a sentence. They are also called open because new words can still be added to these classes.
For example, recent new nouns added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary include:
- Crowdfunding: obtaining funding (as for a new enterprise) by asking for contributions from a large number of people, especially from the online community.
- Freegan: an activist who scavenges for free food (as in waste receptacles at stores and restaurants) as a means of reducing consumption of resources.
- Catfish: a person who sets up a false social networking profile for deceptive purposes.
Each year, hundreds of new words like these are added to popular dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.
Minor or grammatical (or closed) word class
There are four types of words included in the minor (often referred to as “closed”) class.
Minor (closed) words types:
- Conjunctions
- Determiners
- Prepositions
- Pronouns
They are termed minor or grammatical because they tend to perform grammatical functions such as relating expressions to each other. An example here could be seen with how “of” relates “the back” to “house” in the following: “back of the house”
These are also called closed classes as no new words will be added to these groups in the future. They are also sometimes referred to as structure words because their function is to contribute to the structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences, rather than to add to the meaning.
When teaching English, you’ll often see words referred to as content/structure words. This might be when certain grammatical patterns are being taught, or when explaining certain aspects of how we use the English language (“sentence stress” is one such topic which we’ll cover later in the course).