function word

Noun CEFR B2

Definitions

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.

Equivalents

Españolpalabra cenemática palabra funcional palabra gramatical

Françaismot grammatical mot-outil

DeutschFunktionswort Hilfswort LeerwortSynsemantikum

9 more languages

العربيةكَلِمَة وَظِيفِيَّة

Italianoparola vuota

日本語機能語

한국어문법형태소

Nederlandsfunctiewoord

Portuguêspalavra gramatical

Русскийслужебное сло́во

Tiếng Việthư từ

Examples

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

CEFR level

B2

Upper Intermediate
This word is part of the CEFR B2 vocabulary — upper intermediate level.

See all B2 English words →

See also

function-evaluation routine functionability functional functional analysis functional beverage functional constituency

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