Parts of speech Posted July 1997. You have probably been taught that every word has something known as a part of speech. This concept has perhaps caused more trouble than any other aspect of learning English.
Parts of speech are myths.
They are merely inaccurate representations of the properties of words. The attempt to divide up the dictionary of English into classes of words with similar, predictable behavior is doomed to failure, because it is built on faulty assumptions. There are a very small number of categories of words. Words belong only to a single part of speech. In the first three mythbusters we will take each of these and see where the notion of parts of speech fall apart.