125 Fun Facts About Grammar

Traditional grammar divides English words into how many parts of speech?

Traditional school grammar counts eight parts of speech, among them noun, verb, adjective and preposition; modern grammars add determiners and divide the classes differently.

Which part of speech expresses emotion, as in 'oops'?

An interjection such as 'oops' voices a sudden feeling and can stand alone as a complete utterance; the name comes from Latin for 'thrown between', because it is tossed into speech without joining a sentence's grammar.

In 'Swimming is fun', the -ing word acts as a noun; what is that verb form called?

A gerund is an -ing form doing a noun's job, as in 'Swimming is fun'; put the same word before a noun, as in 'a swimming fish', and traditional grammar calls it a participle instead.

'Went' was originally the past tense of which verb before it was borrowed by 'go'?

Wend, meaning to make one's way, gave up 'went' to 'go' by about 1500 and now has only 'wended' as its past tense; linguists call a verb borrowing its forms this way suppletion.

'The cake was eaten by the dog' is in which grammatical voice?

The passive voice makes the receiver of the action the subject and lets the doer vanish altogether, which is why 'mistakes were made' is a stock way to admit an error without saying who made it.

Which mood does the verb 'were' show in 'If I were the teacher'?

The subjunctive is the mood for hypothetical or wished-for situations, which is why 'were' replaces 'was' after 'if I'; fixed phrases such as 'God save the King' and 'heaven forbid' preserve it.

Which of these auxiliary verbs is one of English's nine core modals?

Must is one of the nine core modals, with can, could, may, might, shall, should, will and would; unlike be, do and have, a modal never takes an -s ending, so nobody says 'she musts'.

The serial comma takes its nickname from which publishing house, whose printer Horace Hart prescribed it?

Oxford University Press lent the comma its nickname late: Horace Hart's rulebook called for the mark without naming it, and 'Oxford comma' is first recorded only in 1978, in a history of the press.

A missing comma in a Maine law won dairy drivers a 2017 appeals ruling about what?

Overtime pay was at stake: Maine's law exempted 'packing for shipment or distribution', and with no comma after 'shipment' the judges could not tell whether distributing was exempt, so the drivers won.

The Star Trek phrase 'to boldly go' is the classic example of what?

A split infinitive wedges an adverb between 'to' and its verb, as in 'to boldly go'; English writers have done it since the 1300s, and grammarians only began condemning it in the 1800s.

The quip 'up with which I will not put' mocks which supposed rule?

'Never end a sentence with a preposition' is the rule the quip mocks; it is often credited to Winston Churchill, but its earliest known printings, in the early 1940s, do not mention him.

Which poet laureate's 1672 complaint about a Ben Jonson phrase made preposition-stranding a grammatical sin?

John Dryden faulted a Ben Jonson line in 1672 for ending in a preposition; he had stranded prepositions himself, and later went back through his own prose removing them.

The word apostrophe comes from Greek meaning what?

Turning away or elision is the sense of Greek apostrophos, since the mark shows where a letter has dropped out; even the possessive 's began that way, as a shortened -es ending.

What is the superfluous mark in market signs like 'apple's 50p' commonly called?

The greengrocers' apostrophe is a stray apostrophe in a plural, and the scorn is not only English: Germans call their own misplaced apostrophes the Deppenapostroph, or 'idiot's apostrophe'.

The semicolon first appears in a 1496 book by Pietro Bembo, printed by which Venetian printer?

Aldus Manutius printed Bembo's De Aetna in 1496 with the first semicolon; his press also introduced italic type in 1501 and the pocket-sized octavo book.

What is Project Semicolon?

An anti-suicide initiative and tattoo, Project Semicolon was founded by Amy Bleuel in 2013: a semicolon is used where an author could have ended a sentence but chose not to, and supporters wear the mark as a tattoo.

Martin Speckter proposed the interrobang in 1962 because he wanted one mark for surprised questions in what?

Advertising copy was Speckter's trade: he ran a New York ad agency and disliked seeing surprised questions end in two marks, so he proposed one in the magazine Type Talks; Remington offered a key for it in 1968.

What is the upside-down interrobang called?

The inverted interrobang is the gnaborretni, 'interrobang' spelled backwards; it opens sentences in languages that use inverted question and exclamation marks, and Unicode gives it its own code point.

The name ampersand comes from schoolchildren slurring which phrase?

'And per se and' was how children ended the alphabet, meaning '& by itself is and', and the phrase slurred into ampersand.

The ampersand symbol began as a ligature of the two letters of which Latin word?

Et is Latin for 'and': scribes ran the e and the t together until they fused into &, which is why '&c.' is an old way of writing etc. and some typefaces still show both letters.

The palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw Elba' was implausibly attributed to whom?

The line was implausibly attributed to Napoleon, exiled on Elba in 1814; it was actually coined by a certain 'J.T.R.' in 1848, a century before 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama'.

Guinness lists the 19-letter saippuakivikauppias as the longest known palindromic word; which language is it from?

Finnish supplies the longest known palindromic word, a 19-letter compound for a kind of dealer; English's longest in the Oxford English Dictionary is tattarrattat, James Joyce's word in Ulysses for a knock at a door.

Which musician's song 'Bob' is composed entirely of palindromes?

'Weird Al' Yankovic wrote 'Bob' for his 2003 album Poodle Hat as a Bob Dylan pastiche in which every line, like the title, reads the same backwards; its video parodies Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' film.

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known example of what?

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is a pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet, which is why typewriter tests and font samples use it.

'Jumbo shrimp' and 'deafening silence' are examples of which figure of speech?

An oxymoron yokes two contradictory words, and the term is one itself: it comes from Greek roots meaning 'sharp' and 'dull', or 'pointedly foolish'.

A word like 'dust', which can mean both to remove dust and to add it, is called what?

A contronym carries two opposite meanings; 'cleave' can mean split or cling because two different Old English verbs, one for each sense, ended up spelled the same.

A word with two opposite meanings, such as 'cleave', is nicknamed after which Roman god?

Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, was shown with two faces looking in opposite directions, so a word that points both ways at once, like 'cleave' for split and cling, is a Janus word.

Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year in 2019?

They was Merriam-Webster's 2019 pick as its use for a single nonbinary person spread; the American Dialect Society had honoured that same use in 2015 and went on to name it Word of the Decade.

Which Latin abbreviation introduces an example?

Writers use e.g., short for exempli gratia or 'for example', to bring in instances; i.e., from id est or 'that is', restates the point instead, so swapping the two changes what a sentence claims.

A grammatical sentence made of eight repetitions of one word uses the name of which city?

Buffalo works as a city name, a noun for bison and a verb meaning to bully, so the sentence says that bison from the city bully other bison there; Dmitri Borgmann printed an early version in 1967.

'The horse raced past the barn fell' is a famous example of what?

A garden-path sentence leads readers astray: they take 'raced' as the main verb, then have to backtrack at 'fell' and read it as 'the horse that was raced'; the example is credited to psycholinguist Thomas Bever.

What animal features in the joke behind the title of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves?

A panda eats a sandwich, fires a gun and walks out, then hands over a badly punctuated wildlife guide saying it 'eats, shoots and leaves'; one stray comma turns its diet into a crime spree.

Who wrote the first edition of The Elements of Style, in 1918?

William Strunk Jr., a Cornell professor, wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 for his own students; E. B. White revised and expanded it for a 1959 edition, which is why the book is known as 'Strunk and White'.

What is the paragraph mark ¶ called?

A pilcrow is the word 'paragraph' worn down by centuries of use: Old French paragrafe became pelagraphe, then Middle English pilcraft, and finally pilcrow.

What is joining two independent clauses with only a punctuation mark, as in 'I came, I saw', called?

Joining two independent clauses with only a comma is a comma splice; a fused sentence joins them with no punctuation at all, and novelists such as Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jolley wrote splices freely in their fiction.

'Turning the corner, a handsome school building appeared' illustrates which error?

A dangling modifier has nothing in the sentence to attach to: 'turning the corner' should describe whoever turned, but no walker is named, so the building ends up doing the turning.

The word portmanteau, for a blend like 'brunch' or 'smog', was first used in this sense in which book?

In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that 'slithy' packs 'lithe' and 'slimy' into one word 'like a portmanteau', a two-part suitcase, giving the term its linguistic sense.

Which African country chose a portmanteau name in 1964 when two territories merged?

Tanganyika and Zanzibar became Tanzania; Oxbridge and Brexit are English cousins.

In 'She gave him a gift', which grammatical role does 'him' play?

Indirect object is the role of 'him', the recipient of the giving, while 'a gift' is the direct object; recast the sentence as 'She gave a gift to him' and 'him' becomes the object of a preposition instead.

Which British supermarket swapped its '10 items or less' checkout signs for 'Up to 10 items' in 2008?

Tesco chose 'Up to 10 items' rather than '10 items or fewer', sidestepping the less-versus-fewer argument instead of settling it.

What is the Sator Square?

A five-word Latin grid readable four ways, the Sator Square spells 'Sator arepo tenet opera rotas' across, down and backwards; copies found at Pompeii undercut the theory that early Christians invented it.

Words such as 'buzz' and 'murmur' that imitate the sounds they name are examples of what?

Onomatopoeia comes from Greek words meaning 'name-making': the speaker coins a name straight from the noise, as English did with buzz, hiss and murmur.

The ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini packed which language's grammar into nearly 4,000 terse rules?

Sanskrit owes its classical form to Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī: his rules set the standard for the language, and their quasi-mathematical style has been compared to modern generative grammar.

Which language's academy recommended an opening inverted question mark in 1754?

Spanish adopted the opening ¿ after the Real Academia Española recommended it in the 1754 second edition of its Ortografía; use became general only during the nineteenth century.

One theory traces the exclamation mark to which Latin cry of joy, its letters written one above the other?

Io was a Latin shout of joy; in this account scribes wrote it with the I above the o and the o shrank to a dot, though another view derives the mark from an abbreviation of 'interiectio'.

How did typists make an exclamation mark on typewriters that lacked the key?

A period, backspace, then an apostrophe stacked the stroke above the dot; people dictating to typists had a quicker way to call for the mark and simply said 'bang'.

In which operating system does the '#!' that opens a script go by the nickname 'shebang'?

Unix scripts open with '#!', nicknamed the shebang because programmers read the exclamation mark as 'bang', a name American typesetting manuals were already using in the 1950s.

Mark Twain joked that in German a turnip is feminine while which of these is grammatically neuter?

A girl is 'das Mädchen', neuter because the diminutive ending -chen makes any German noun neuter; Twain's essay 'The Awful German Language' protested that 'a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has'.

'Scuba' and 'radar' began as strings of initials and are now ordinary words; what is such a word called?

An acronym is pronounced as a word, unlike an initialism such as FBI; radar packs 'radio detecting and ranging' and scuba 'self-contained underwater breathing apparatus', phrases few speakers now recall.

The paragraph mark ¶ grew out of a letter C standing for which Latin word?

Capitulum means 'little head'; medieval scribes drew the mark in red ink to flag a new train of thought before paragraph breaks existed.

Workers at which company coined 'octothorpe' for the # key by 1968?

Bell Labs engineers needed names for the # and * keys being added to the touch-tone telephone keypad; 'octothorpe' first reached a US patent in 1973.

Which US magazine is famous for spelling 'reënter' with two dots over the second e?

The New Yorker keeps the diaeresis in words such as 'reënter' to show that the doubled vowels belong to separate syllables, a mark most other publications dropped long ago for a hyphen or nothing at all.

Which linguist wrote 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' to show a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless?

Noam Chomsky used the sentence in Syntactic Structures (1957): it is nonsense yet perfectly well formed, while its mirror image, 'Furiously sleep ideas green colorless', is not even grammatical.

The term 'eggcorn', for a misheard phrase like 'old-timers' disease', comes from mishearing what?

The name was suggested on the Language Log blog in 2003 after a woman was found writing 'egg corn' for acorn, the oak's nut.

Sylvia Wright coined 'mondegreen' in 1954 after hearing 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen' in what?

A Scottish ballad, 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray', was read to her as a child from Percy's Reliques, and she pictured a Lady Mondegreen slain beside the earl; she argued such mishearings beat the original.

Swapping the first sounds of two words, as in 'blushing crow' for 'crushing blow', is called what?

A spoonerism is named for the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, an Oxford don who was reportedly prone to such slips; 'runny babbit' for 'bunny rabbit' is another classic.

Confusing similar-sounding words, as in 'the very pineapple of politeness', is called what?

'Pineapple' for 'pinnacle' is a malapropism, named for Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's 1775 comedy The Rivals; Shakespeare's Constable Dogberry made the same mistakes, so it is also called a Dogberryism.

Inserting a word inside another, as in 'abso-bloody-lutely', is called what?

'Abso-bloody-lutely' shows tmesis, cutting one word open to insert another; in English the insert is usually an expletive, and the Roman poet Ennius famously split 'cerebrum' around a verb.

Which plural of 'octopus' wrongly treats the Greek-derived word as if it were Latin?

Octopi assumes a Latin -us ending that takes -i, but the word comes from Greek oktōpous, 'eight-footed', so the pedant's plural would be octopodes; plain octopuses is the standard choice.

The name of the schwa, the unstressed 'uh' vowel, reached English through German from which language?

Hebrew passed the word on: shva names a vowel point marking a very short or absent vowel, and English borrowed it in its German form, which is why it is spelled with 'sch'.

Paul Passy's group of language teachers, founded in 1886, devised which alphabet?

The International Phonetic Alphabet first appeared in 1888 from Passy's teachers, who wanted one symbol for each sound so that pupils could learn foreign pronunciation without being misled by spelling.

In Esperanto, every noun ends with which letter?

Every Esperanto noun ends in -o; adjectives end in -a and present-tense verbs in -as, so a word's part of speech shows at a glance, and plurals add -j.

The 'Ye' in 'Ye Olde Shoppe' comes from printers substituting y for which lost English letter?

Early type sets lacked thorn (þ), so printers set y for it and 'ye' was always pronounced 'the'; the 1611 King James Bible used the abbreviation in places.

What are the angled « » quotation marks used in French called?

Guillemets are 'little Guillaumes', named by tradition after the punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé, although the marks appear in a book printed in 1527, when he was a small child.

Henry Denham's reversed ⸮ mark of the 1580s was meant to end what kind of sentence?

Denham's reversed mark, now called the percontation point, was meant to close a rhetorical question; it never caught on with printers, though it survives as a character in Unicode.

A text that deliberately avoids a letter, like the E-less 1939 novel Gadsby, is called what?

Gadsby is a lipogram, a text written without a chosen letter; Ernest Vincent Wright could not use any number between six and thirty, since all of their names contain an e.

The ghost word 'dord' entered Webster's 1934 dictionary from a misread note, 'D or d', abbreviating what?

Density was the intended entry: a slip listing 'D or d' as its abbreviation was mistaken for a word, and 'dord' went unnoticed until an editor saw in 1939 that it had no etymology.

Spaces between words returned to Latin manuscripts in the 7th and 8th centuries through scribes from where?

Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England led the change: Latin had once separated its words, then run them together as scriptio continua, and scribes there began spacing them again between about AD 600 and 800.

In linguistics, an asterisk before a sentence signals that it is what?

A starred sentence is ungrammatical by native-speaker judgement; the convention began in historical linguistics, where the asterisk marks reconstructed forms nobody ever saw written down, then spread to ill-formed sentences.

The dagger † and the division sign ÷ both descend from the obelus, Greek for what?

An obelos was a sharpened spit or roasting skewer; ancient editors drew the mark beside lines judged spurious, as if skewering the dubious text.

Which punctuation mark takes its name from the Greek for 'leave out'?

The ellipsis takes its name from Greek élleipsis, 'omission', because its dots stand for words left out; the same root, meaning to fall short, also named the ellipse of geometry.

In English word pairs that repeat with a changed vowel, which vowel sound almost always comes first?

The i of 'hit' comes first, as in tick-tock, zig-zag and ding-dong, which is why nobody says 'tock-tick'; three-part runs such as tic-tac-toe follow the same order.

In English's usual adjective order, as in 'lovely little old house', which type comes first?

Opinion comes first, ahead of size, age and colour; native speakers follow the order without ever being taught it, which is why 'old little lovely house' sounds wrong.

Which dash, half the width of an em dash, joins number ranges such as 1914–1918?

An en dash is half the width of an em dash; printers nicknamed the two the 'nut' and the 'mutton' so that en and em would not be confused when spoken aloud.

Using two negatives to make a weakened positive, as in 'not unhappy', is called what?

'Not unhappy' is litotes, an understatement that affirms by negating its opposite; in many dialects a second negative instead intensifies, as in Chaucer's 'He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde'.

Which word did Webster's Third (1961) say was used orally 'by many cultivated speakers'?

Ain't lost its old 'illiterate' label in the 1961 edition, which noted its use by cultivated speakers; Toronto's Globe and Mail replied that the dictionary's embrace of the word would 'comfort the ignorant'.

Animal-group names like 'a pride of lions' are traditionally called terms of what, an old word for hunting?

Venery, kin to 'venison', is an old word for the hunt; the 1486 Book of Saint Albans listed such terms for hunters and slipped in jokes about people, such as 'a doctrine of doctors'.

'Children' was formed by adding -en to which earlier plural of 'child'?

The Middle English plural childer took a second plural ending, -en, making children a double plural; 'brethren' and 'oxen' are the other -en survivors in everyday use.

The most common basic word order among the world's languages, used by Japanese, Persian and Latin, is which?

Subject–object–verb is the commonest basic order in every large survey, ahead of the subject–verb–object pattern of English; orders that put the object first are vanishingly rare.

Marc Okrand gave Klingon which basic word order, the exact reverse of English's?

Object–verb–subject mirrors English's subject–verb–object; Okrand deliberately chose typologically rare features so that Klingon would sound alien, and set them out in his 1985 Klingon Dictionary.

Sonja Lang's minimalist language Toki Pona is built from roughly how many words?

About 120 words is all that Sonja Lang's first book on the language taught, so speakers build ideas by combination: 'telo nasa', literally strange liquid, can mean alcohol.

'Esperanto' began as its creator's pen name; what does the word mean?

One who hopes is the meaning of 'Doktoro Esperanto', the pseudonym L. L. Zamenhof used when he published his new language in 1887; early speakers liked the name so much that it stuck to the language itself.

What is the small dot over a lowercase i or j called?

A tittle shares a Latin root with 'title'; the King James Bible's promise that not 'one jot or one tittle' of the law would pass made it a byword for the tiniest detail.

Perec's E-less 1969 novel La Disparition appeared in English under what title?

Gilbert Adair's 1994 translation, A Void, kept the constraint and uses no letter e; Perec then wrote Les Revenentes using no vowel except e.

The nonsense phrase 'etaoin shrdlu' comes from the keyboard of which machine?

On a Linotype, the first two columns of keys read etaoin and shrdlu; operators ran a finger down them to fill out a botched line, and the slug sometimes made it into print.

'Irregardless' is thought to blend 'regardless' with which word?

Irrespective and regardless probably blended to make irregardless; critics object that the result negates itself twice, since the prefix ir- repeats the negative already supplied by -less.

Mark Twain wrote that Tom Sawyer was '… rolling in wealth' with which intensifier?

Literally was Twain's choice, and the habit was old even then: dictionaries date 'literally' as a mere intensifier to 1769, so the supposed modern slip is over 250 years old.

Which style guide dropped its ban on 'hopefully' meaning 'it is hoped' in 2012?

The AP Stylebook dropped its objection in 2012, half a century after critics made the usage a bugbear in the 1960s; by then most of the American Heritage usage panel accepted it too.

Which 'law' holds that anything written to criticise editing or proofreading will contain a fault of its own?

Muphry's law deliberately misspells Murphy to prove its own point; John Bangsund of the Society of Editors in Victoria, Australia, set it out in 1992.

The 'Cupertino effect' is named after old spell checkers mangling which word?

Cooperation is the word old spell checkers turned into Cupertino, which is how official documents came to mention the 'South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino'.

Which word, coined by economist Glen Whitman, names a fill-in-the-blank cliché such as 'X is the new Y'?

Snowclone was Whitman's answer to a Language Log appeal for a name; it nods to the template 'If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z'.

What is the smallest meaningful unit of language, such as the -s in 'cats'?

A morpheme is a unit of meaning, not of sound: the plural ending is pronounced three ways, as in cats, dogs and horses, yet it remains one and the same morpheme.

The modern comma descends from which medieval mark used to show a pause?

A diagonal slash called the virgula suspensiva marked pauses from the 13th to the 17th century before shrinking into the comma, which is why the French word for a comma is still 'virgule'.

The punctuation term colon comes from a Greek word for which body part, a sentence's 'member'?

A limb is what kōlon meant, and by extension a member or clause of a sentence; the name then passed from the clause to the mark that set it off.

The word hyphen comes from a Greek phrase meaning what?

Hyphen comes from hyph' hen, 'under one' or 'together'; the original sign was a small tie drawn beneath two letters to show the letters belonged to one word, before word spacing existed.

Which word game asking for nouns and verbs took its title from an overheard restaurant argument?

Mad Libs got its title in 1958, when its creators overheard an agent call an actor's plan to 'ad-lib' an interview 'mad'. Each blank in its stories is labelled with a category such as noun or verb.

A Calvin and Hobbes comic strip about bending grammar concludes that which practice 'weirds language'?

Verbing weirds language, the strip concludes, turning both 'verb' and 'weird' into verbs to prove the point. Thousands of everyday English verbs, including 'mail', 'salt' and 'host', were made the same way.

The most commonly used word in the English language, 'the', belongs to which class of words?

Articles are a class of just two words, 'the' and 'a' (which becomes 'an' before a vowel sound). 'The' alone accounts for about 7% of all the words used in English.

English forms many adverbs by adding -ly, but which of these -ly words is an adjective instead?

Lonely is an adjective, like 'lively' and 'ugly'. English avoids making adverbs from such words because the results are awkward to say, so a speaker rewords: 'in a friendly way', not 'friendlily'.

Which of these words is an adverb, an Anglo-Saxon survivor with no need of the usual -ly ending?

Seldom is an adverb that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times and has never needed -ly. The other three are adjectives, which become adverbs only as 'suddenly', 'solemnly' and 'simply'.

In British English, 'team' and 'government' may take a plural verb as examples of which kind of noun?

Collective nouns label a group as one unit, so British speakers can say 'the team have finished' when thinking of its members. American English almost always keeps the verb singular.

Which of these is a mass noun, taking 'much' rather than 'many' and normally having no plural form?

Furniture is a mass noun, so English buys 'a piece of furniture', never 'a furniture' or 'two furnitures'. The same set of seats can be counted as 'seven chairs' yet only measured as furniture.

Which of these words is a preposition, like 'of', 'in' and 'to', three of the ten most used English words?

Beneath is a preposition meaning at a lower level than something else, as in 'the ground beneath her feet'. It is mostly a word of formal writing; in speech, 'under' and 'below' are far more usual.

In 'Maria sailed from Lisbon to Brazil', the three capitalised words are all which kind of noun?

Proper nouns identify one particular person, place or thing, and English marks them with a capital letter. German goes further and capitalises every noun, so a capital alone proves nothing there.

In 'The soup tasted weird', 'tasted' is which kind of verb, a group that also includes 'seem' and 'become'?

Linking verbs take no object; the words after them describe the subject instead. 'Feel', 'look', 'smell' and 'sound' can work the same way, as in 'the detective felt sick'.

Which of these words is a conjunction, a joining word in the same family as 'if', 'although' and 'because'?

Unless is a conjunction meaning 'except if'. The clause it introduces cannot stand alone: 'unless it rains' needs a main clause to become a complete sentence.

Which of these words is a verb, the part of speech that changes form to show tense?

Arrive is a verb, so it becomes 'arrived' to show the past, a change its noun relative 'arrival' can never make. Verbs are one of the four major word classes, with nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

Which of these nouns is abstract, the kind English commonly builds with suffixes such as -ness and -ity?

Justice is an abstract noun: it labels an idea, not something the senses can observe. Some nouns work both ways, so 'art' is abstract in 'art is important' but concrete when it is stuck to the fridge.

Which of these 'any' words is an indefinite pronoun, able to act as the subject of a sentence?

Anybody is an indefinite pronoun, like 'somebody' and 'everything'. Its twin 'anyone' means the same, but the -body forms are the ones people favour in informal speech.

Which of these pronouns is reflexive, the type used when a verb's subject and object are the same person?

Herself is a reflexive pronoun, as in 'Agnes looked at herself in the mirror'. English reflexives all end in -self or -selves, which makes them easy to spot.

'This', 'that', 'these' and 'those', used to point to people and things, belong to which group of words?

Demonstratives point things out: 'this' and 'these' for what is close to the speaker, 'that' and 'those' for what is further away. Each can sit before a noun or replace it entirely.

In 'That scarf is very similar to mine', the word 'mine' is which kind of pronoun?

Possessive pronouns such as 'mine', 'hers' and 'theirs' stand in for a whole noun phrase, so 'mine' here means 'my scarf'. 'My' cannot do that job, because it must sit before a noun.

'Tallest', 'best' and 'most interesting' show which form of an adjective, ranking one thing above a whole group?

Superlative forms mark one person or thing as having more of a quality than all the others in a group. One-syllable adjectives usually add -est, but 'best' is irregular: good, better, best.

'Take off', 'come out' and 'make out', whose meanings cannot be guessed from their parts, are which kind of verb?

Phrasal verbs pair a main verb with an adverb particle such as 'up', 'off' or 'out'. The results tend to be less formal than a single-word equivalent: 'sort out' a problem rather than 'resolve' it.

Adverbs such as 'usually', 'always' and 'never' answer which question about an action or event?

How often is what these words reveal, which is why grammars call them adverbs of frequency. 'Always' is also fussy about position: it can open a command, but not a statement or a question.

The word 'noun' descends from the Roman grammarians' term 'nomen', which has which everyday meaning?

Name is the root meaning: to the Romans, a noun was simply what something was called. Old English skipped the borrowed term and used its own word 'name' for this part of speech.

The grammar term 'preposition' descends from the old Roman verb 'praeponere', which literally means to do what?

Put before is the literal sense, because a preposition normally stands in front of the noun it governs. Old English coined its own version of the label, 'foresetnys'.

Which ancient philosopher wrote in the Cratylus that sentences combine just two kinds of word, verbs and nouns?

Plato named only verbs and nouns as the ingredients of a sentence. Aristotle then added a third class of connecting words, and later grammarians kept on subdividing.

In 'It rained', the word 'it' refers to nothing at all, earning which label from grammarians?

Dummy pronoun is the term: 'it' merely fills the subject slot that English insists on. Portuguese and Turkish feel no such need and simply leave the subject out.

Which of these adverbs is 'flat', sharing its exact form with an adjective instead of adding -ly?

Fast is a flat adverb, identical to its adjective, so a fast runner simply runs fast. Such adverbs were once common, until 18th-century grammarians insisted that adverbs should end in -ly.

Which shape word can serve as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb and preposition without changing its spelling?

Round fills all five roles: a round of golf, to round a corner, a round table, to turn round, and round the bend. British English favours it as a preposition where Americans usually say 'around'.

Unlike a true preposition, which English word follows the phrase it governs and so is sometimes called a postposition?

Ago comes after its phrase, as in 'three days ago', so some modern grammars label it a postposition. 'Notwithstanding' is one of the few other English words that can do the same.

Which of these words can work as a preposition, a conjunction and an adverb, depending on the sentence?

Since does all three jobs: a preposition in 'since Monday', a conjunction in 'since we met' and an adverb in 'we haven't spoken since'. As a conjunction it can also give a reason instead of a time.

Older English grammars used which term for the noun, to tell it apart from the 'noun adjective'?

Substantive was needed because 'noun' once covered adjectives too, so grammars split the class into nouns substantive and nouns adjective. Only later did 'noun' narrow to its modern sense.

Turning an adjective or verb into a noun, as 'happy' becomes 'happiness', is a process known as what?

Nominalization can work by adding an ending such as -ness or -ion, as in 'legalization' from 'legalize'. It can also happen with no change at all, as when a walker goes 'for a walk'.