Word.ws English Dictionary

function words

function words is the plural of function word.

Meaning of function word

Noun

function word (plural function words)

  1. A word that has little meaning when standing alone, but instead serves to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker, including conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, certain frequent adverbs.
    • Durrant (2009), for example, developed a list of 1000 academic two-word bigrams, of which 763 were lexical words combined with function words.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Position vectors, homologous chromosomes and gamma rays: Promoting disciplinary literacy through Secondary Phrase Lists”, in English for Specific Purposes, →DOI...

Questions about function words

What is function words the plural of?
Function words is the plural of function word.

Words near function words in the dictionary

  1. function table
  2. function tables
  3. function value
  4. function values
  5. function word
  6. function words
  7. function-evaluation routine
  8. function-evaluation routines
  9. functionability
  10. functionable
  11. functionaire

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: function words (page history and authors); function word (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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