function word
"function-word" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“function word” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - 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, inclu...
Corpus desk
Index EN-function-word · function word · English
function word · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "F" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | function word |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “function word” in English
Rare enough to double-check
function word is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "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, inclu...".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for function word, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is function word, spelled F-U-N-C-T-I-O-N- -W-O-R-D.
Definition
- 1A 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.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how function word appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Durrant (2009), for example, developed a list of 1000 academic two-word bigrams, of which 763 were lexical words combined with function words.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.