Meanings
plural function words
- human sciencesA 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.
Durrant (2009), for example, developed a list of 1000 academic two-word bigrams, of which 763 were lexical words combined with function words.
2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Position vectors, homologous chromosomes and gamma rays: Promoting disciplinary literacy through Secondary Phrase Lists”, in English for Specific Purposes, →DOI, page 2Synonyms: functor, grammatical word · Antonyms: content word, lexical word
Synonyms & antonyms
nounA 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.
More synonyms by meaning
nouna word that is uninflected and serves a grammatical function but has little identifiable meaning
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Translations
Arabic كَلِمَة وَظِيفِيَّة
- كَلِمَة وَظِيفِيَّة (kalima waẓīfiyya)function word
Dutch functiewoord
- functiewoordfunction word
Finnish funktiosana, kieliopillinen sana
- funktiosanafunction word
- kieliopillinen sanafunction word
French mot-outil, mot grammatical
- mot-outilfunction word
- mot grammaticalfunction word
German Funktionswort, Synsemantikum
- Funktionswortfunction word
- Synsemantikumfunction word
Italian parola vuota
- parola vuotafunction word
Japanese 機能語
- 機能語 (kinōgo)function word
Korean 문법형태소
- 문법형태소 (munbeophyeongtaeso)function word
Polish funktor
- funktorfunction word
Portuguese palavra gramatical
- palavra gramaticalfunction word
Russian служебное сло́во
- служебное сло́во (služebnoje slóvo)function word
Spanish palabra funcional, palabra gramatical
- palabra funcionalfunction word
- palabra gramaticalfunction word
- palabra cenemáticafunction word
Swedish formord, funktionsord
- formordfunction word
- funktionsordfunction word
Welsh gair ffwythiannol
- gair ffwythiannolfunction word
Cite this entry
function word. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/function%20word
“function word.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/function%20word. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “function word,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/function%20word.
Source: function word on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.