Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

function word

Word Rarity Uncommon

Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.66 in modern English

Syllables: func-tion -word
IPA

21

Scrabble Score

12

Letters

3

Syllables

10

Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

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.

Example Sentences

"Durrant (2009), for example, developed a list of 1000 academic two-word bigrams, of which 763 were lexical words combined with function words."

Inflected Forms

function words (plural)

Synonyms

functor grammatical word closed-class word

Antonyms

content word lexical word

Questions

What does function word mean?: 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.

How to pronounce function word

Open the pronunciation page — Open the Speakur entry for “function word”.
Read the phonetic spelling — Read the IPA spelling () so you know which sounds to aim for.
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Repeat and practice — Say “function word” aloud, matching stress and vowels until it feels natural.