function word — English Dictionary

Noun

1. 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.

   Synonyms

   functorgrammatical word

   Antonyms

   content wordlexical word

   Examples

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

Noun

1. a word that is uninflected and serves a grammatical function but has little identifiable meaning

   Synonyms

   closed-class word

   Broader terms

   word