What are verbs?

Verbs Express Actions

Verbs are doing words. A verb can express:


A physical action (e.g., to swim, to write, to climb).
A mental action (e.g., to think, to guess, to consider).
A state of being (e.g., to be, to exist, to appear).

The verbs which express a state of being are the ones which take a little practice to spot, but, actually, they are the most common. The most common verb is the verb to be. That's the one which goes:

Subject	Verb to bein the past tense	Verb to bein the present tense	Verb to bein the future tense
I	was	am	will be
You	were	are	will be
He / She / It	was	is	will be
We	were	are	will be
You	were	are	will be
They	were	are	will be

If you're a native English speaker who's new to studying grammar, you probably know this table without even knowing you know it.

What are prepositions?

PrepositionsA preposition is a word which precedes a noun (or apronoun) to show the noun's (or the pronoun's) relationship to another word in the sentence. (The wordpreposition comes from the idea of being positioned before. It is not true to say that a preposition always precedes a noun or a pronoun, but it does most of the time.)

The following are all prepositions:

above, about, across, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, down, during, except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off, on, since, to, toward, through, under, until, up, upon, with and within.

What are nouns?

A noun is a word for a person, place, or thing. (You might like to think of nouns as naming words.)

Everything we can see or talk about is represented by a word which names it. That "naming word" is called a noun.

Sometimes a noun will be the name for something we can touch (e.g., lion, cake, computer), and sometimes a noun will be the name for something we cannot touch (e.g., bravery, mile, joy).

Everything is represented by a word that lets us talk about it. This includes people (e.g., man, scientist), animals (e.g., dog, lizard), places (e.g., town, street), objects (e.g., vase, pencil), substances (e.g., copper, glass), qualities (e.g., heroism, sorrow), actions (e.g., swimming, dancing), and measures (e.g., inch, ounce).

What Is an Adverb?

An adverb can be added to a verb to modify its meaning. Usually, an adverb tells you when, where, how, in what manner, or to what extent an action is performed.

Many adverbs end in ly — particularly those that are used to express how an action is performed.

Although many adverbs end ly, lots do not, e.g., fast, never, well, very, most, least, more, less, now, far, and there.

Adjective

Definition of Adjective

Adjectives are describing words. Large, grey, and friendlyare all examples of adjectives. In the examples below, these adjectives are used to describe an elephant.

Examples:

Large elephant
Grey elephant
Friendly elephant