What Are Parts of Speech?

Every word in the English language has a job. Some words name things. Some words show action. Some words describe. Some words connect ideas. The way we sort these words by the job they do is called parts of speech.

Think of a sentence like a football team. Every player has a position — striker, defender, goalkeeper, midfielder. You can't have eleven goalkeepers and win a match. Each player has a role to play, and the team works because every role is filled by the right type of player.

It's the same with words in a sentence.

Look at this sentence:

Aminata quickly read the interesting book in the library.

Every word here is doing a different job:

• Aminata names a person
• quickly describes how the action happened
• read shows the action
• the points to a specific book
• interesting describes the book
• book names a thing
• in connects "library" to the rest of the sentence
• library names a place

If you swap any word for the wrong type — say, replacing read (action) with library (place) — the sentence breaks. Aminata quickly library the interesting book in the library makes no sense.

Why this matters

When you understand parts of speech, three things become easier:

1. You write clearer sentences. You know what kind of word fits in each spot.
2. You spot mistakes faster. When something feels wrong in a sentence, parts of speech help you name what's wrong.
3. You score better on WAEC. Many questions in Paper 1 directly test whether you can identify the part of speech of underlined words.

In this topic, we'll go through each of the eight main parts of speech. By the end, you will be able to look at any sentence and identify what job each word is doing.

Let's start with the overview.