Word Type
's can be a verb, a particle, a pronoun or a suffix.
's used as a verb:
-
"The dog’s running after me!" -
"The dog’s been chasing the mail carrier again." -
"What’s he do for a living?" - are
"Where’s the table tennis balls?"
Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →
's used as a particle:
- Possessive marker, indicating than an object belongs to the noun phrase bearing the marker.
"The cat bit the dog’s tail and ran. (the dog + ’s)" - In the absence of a specified object, used to indicate “the house/place/establishment of”.
"We’re going to Luigi’s for dinner tonight. — that is, “Luigi’s house” or “Luigi’s restaurant”"
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's used as a pronoun:
- Contracted form of us found in the formula let’s used to form first-person plural imperatives. Let’s is now considered as a compound.
"What are you guys waiting for? Let’s go!" - Contracted form of as in its nonstandard use as a relative pronoun.
"All’s he wanted was to go home."
A pronoun is a placeholder for a noun. Examples of pronouns are: them, he, they, it. Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns. For example, instead of saying 'Emily was happy, so Emily smiled.' you can say 'Emily was happy, so she smiled.' Learn more →
's used as a suffix:
- Indicates a purpose or a user.
"You need a driver’s licence." - Used to form the plurals of numerals, letters, some abbreviations and some nouns, usually because the omission of an apostrophe would make the meaning unclear or ambiguous.
"There are four 3’s in my phone number." - Used to form plurals of foreign words, to clarify pronunciation, such as “banana’s” or “pasta’s”.
- Used to form the plural of nouns that correctly take just an "s" in the plural. See greengrocer’s apostrophe.
"Apple’s 50p a pound"
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Related Searches
What type of word is 's?
- Verb usage: The dog’s running after me!
- Verb usage: The dog’s been chasing the mail carrier again.
- Verb usage: What’s he do for a living?
- Verb usage: Where’s the table tennis balls?
- Particle usage: The cat bit the dog’s tail and ran. (the dog + ’s)
- Particle usage: The cat bit the dog with the shaggy fur’s tail and ran. (the dog with the shaggy fur + ’s)
- Particle usage: We’re going to Luigi’s for dinner tonight. — that is, “Luigi’s house” or “Luigi’s restaurant”
- Particle usage: I'm nipping to the butcher’s for a steak.
- Pronoun usage: What are you guys waiting for? Let’s go!
- Pronoun usage: All’s he wanted was to go home.
- Suffix usage: You need a driver’s licence.
- Suffix usage: These are popular boy’s T-shirts.
- Suffix usage: Alex can be a girl’s name.
- Suffix usage: There are four 3’s in my phone number.
- Suffix usage: “Banana” has three a’s and one b. (apostrophe "s" used so that the plural of “a” is not confused with the word “as”)
- Suffix usage: You can buy CD’s in that shop.
- Suffix usage: These are the do’s and don’ts. (apostrophe "s" used as “dos” may be misread)
- Suffix usage: Apple’s 50p a pound
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of 's are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of 's, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).