function word

American  

noun

1. a word, as a preposition, article, auxiliary, or pronoun, that chiefly expresses grammatical relationships, has little semantic content of its own, and belongs to a small, closed class of words whose membership is relatively fixed (distinguished from content word).

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function word British  

noun

1. grammar a word, such as the , with a particular grammatical role but little identifiable meaning Compare content word grammatical meaning

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Etymology

Origin of function word

First recorded in 1935–40

Example Sentences

The article examines how likely it is that a playwright will use one function word near another, a group of tendencies they dub a “word-adjacency network.”

From The New Yorker • Feb. 19, 2017