Words and Word Classes

Word is a single unit of language which has meaning and can be spoken or written. It is the smallest element in a sentence. To be a word, word should have a part of speech, a word stress, and meaning understood by the user and the audience.

It is estimated that average speakers of a language know from 45,000 to 60,000 words. An educated person knows some 75,000 words while an ordinary person knows some 35,000 words easily. In an online magazine article "The words in the mental cupboard", BBC claimed that there is between one to two million words in English-- one word is created every 98 minutes.

WORD CLASSES

All words belong to certain categories called word classes (or parts of speech). How they are categorized depends on the role each word plays in a sentence. In English, there are 8 word classes:

• Nouns
• Pronouns
• Verbs
• Adjectives 
• Adverbs
• Prepositions
• Conjunctions
• Interjections