Word Type
Them can be a determiner or a pronoun.
them used as a determiner:
- those
"Them kids need to grow up."
Determiners are a special kind of describing word used with nouns. In the sentence "Some people don't eat animals." the determiner "some" modifies the "people" noun so that refers specifically to a subset of people. In the sentence "The person doesn't eat animals." the determiner "the" modifies the "person" noun so it refers to a specific person that would be evident if we had more context. Learn more →
them used as a pronoun:
- Third personal plural pronoun used after a preposition or as the object of a verb.
"Give it to them. (after preposition)" - Third person singular pronoun of indeterminate or irrelevant gender
"If someone comes and asks for the ticket, just give it to them. (after preposition)"
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is them?
- Determiner usage: Them kids need to grow up.
- Pronoun usage: Give it to them. (after preposition)
- Pronoun usage: She wrote them a letter. (indirect object)
- Pronoun usage: She treated them for a cold. (direct object)
- Pronoun usage: If someone comes and asks for the ticket, just give it to them. (after preposition)
- Pronoun usage: If one of my patients calls, please bring them their dinner. (indirect object)
- Pronoun usage: If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate them. (direct object)
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of them 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 them, 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).
