Download Grammar glossary KS1 - Nonsuch Primary School

Key Stage 1
Word
Adjective
Definition
Adjectives describe the noun.
Adverb
Examples:
 It was a delicious cake.
 They patted the fluffy dog.
 The water was freezing.
Adverbs describe the verb. They sometimes end in ‘-ly’.
Antonym
Examples:
 He walked quickly.
 Usha soon started snoring loudly.
 Luckily, it didn’t rain.
Two words are antonyms if they are opposites.
Examples:
 hot – cold
 light – dark
 happy – sad
Apostrophe
Alert!! The antonym of ‘antonym’ is synonym!
Apostrophes have two uses.
1) Showing where there are missing letters (omission or contraction)
Examples:
 I’m hungry.
 They’re chasing me!
2) Showing when something belongs to somebody/something
(possession)
Compound,
compounding
Examples:
 Ahmed is Sofia’s brother.
 Have you seen Luke’s pen?
 The girls’ toilets are over there.
A compound word contains at least two root words.
Examples:
 Whiteboard
 Superman
 Blackbird
 One-eyed
Conjunction
Consonant
Continuous
Digraph
Conjunctions link two words or phrases together
Examples:
 James bought a bat and ball.
 Everyone watches when Kyle does back-flips.
 Joe can’t practise kicking because he’s injured.
A consonant is any letter which isn’t a vowel!
See ‘progressive’.
A digraph is a grapheme where two letters represent one phoneme.
Examples: Each
Coat
shed
Sometimes the letters aren’t next to each other. This is called a split
digraph.
Future
tense
Examples: mine
like
Unlike lots of other languages, English doesn’t have just one future tense.
We write about the future in lots of different ways.
Grapheme
Examples:
 We are going to the zoo tomorrow. (present continuous)
 He might come to my party. (modal verb)
 The train leaves at 21:00. (present simple)
 The museum will close in ten minutes. (will + infinitive)
A letter, or letters, which make a single phoneme in a word.
Homonym
Examples:
 The phoneme /t/ is written using the same grapheme in ‘bet’, ‘ate’
and ‘ten’.
 The phoneme /f/ is written using different graphemes in ‘phone’
and ‘five’.
Two words are homonym if they look and sound the same, but they have
different meanings.
Examples: Has he left yet?
Yes, he went through the door on the left.
Small dogs bark a lot!
Trees are covered in bark.
Homophone
Two words are homophones if they sound the same but they have
different spellings.
Examples: Can you hear that?
Come here!
Infinitive
The sun is bright today!
Prince Charles is the Queen’s son.
An infinitive is the ‘normal’ form of a verb, how it is written in the
dictionary.
Examples: Walk
Swing
Lurk
Dive
We often use infinitives
1) After ‘to’
Example:
 I want to walk.
 She doesn’t to talk when she’s working.
Noun
2) After modal verbs
Examples:
 I might go swimming.
 Everybody must wear a swimming hat.
Nouns are people, places, things, or ideas.
Examples:
 I’m going to school.
 He’s an astronaut.
Nouns are either concrete (you can touch them) or abstract (you can’t
touch them).
Examples:
 The pen is on the table.
 Love makes the world go round.
Proper nouns are names and they start with a capital letter.
Example: Tom is cool!
Noun phrase A noun phrase is a phrase which has a noun as its main word, all the other
words in that phrase help to explain the noun.
Past tense
Examples:
 Dark red foxes are usually adults.
 Foxes with bushy tails are beautiful.
 Almost all healthy adult foxes in this
area can jump.
We use the past tense to talk about things that have happened in the
past!
Examples:
 Elsa went on holiday
 We had fish fingers for tea
Phoneme
Alert!! We also use the past tense to:
 Say what we wish for
I wish I had £1 million!
 Be very polite.
I was hoping I could give my homework in late.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound which has a meaning.
Examples:
 Cat has three phonemes: c + a + t
 Can has three phonemes: c + a + n
So the phonemes t and n are very important here because they can
change the meaning of the whole word!
Phrase
Alert!! A phoneme can be made up of one, two, three or four letters (look
at digraph and trigraph). When we write a phoneme down, we call it a
grapheme.
A phrase is a group of words that are grammatically connected and work
together to explain a single word. There can be different types of
phrases.
Examples:
 Noun phrase: Dark red foxes are usually adults.
 Prepositional phrase: She waved to her mother.
Plural
A plural noun is a noun which describes two or more people, places or
things. A plural noun normally has the suffix ‘s’ or ‘es’.
Examples:
 dog = dogs


house = houses
box = boxes
Alert!! An irregular noun can have any type of ending (or morphology).
Examples:
 child = children
 mouse = mice
 sky = skies
Possessive
Using a possessive is all about showing that something/somebody belongs
to or is connected to something/somebody else. There are different
ways to show possession.
 Noun + apostrophe
Examples: Marnie’s jumper, Charlotte’s trousers.
 Possessive pronoun
Examples: His trainers, Their PE kits
 Possessive adjective
Examples: That water bottle is mine. That rubber belongs to her.
Preposition
Prepositions tell you where or when something
something else.
is in relation to
Examples:
 Peter went into the room before Rachel.
 He looked inside the box.
 Go through the red door.
Present
tense
Alert!! Prepositions are usually followed by a noun.
We normally use the present tense to talk about the present, or regular
habits.
Examples:
 Everybody is in assembly now.
 Mario goes swimming every week.
 School starts at 8.55am.
Alert!! We can also use the present to talk about future plans.
Examples:
 I am going to the dentist tomorrow.

Progressive
It’s going to rain this afternoon.
The progressive (or ‘continuous’) form of a verb normally describes things
that are happening now.
Examples:
 I am talking to you!
 Look! That man is dancing like a robot.
Alert!! We can also use the progressive (or ‘continuous’) to talk about
something that was happening in the past!
Examples:
 Michael was singing in the shower.
 It had been raining all morning.
Pronoun
Pronouns are used to replace the noun, to avoid repetition.
Examples:
 Simon broke it. = He broke it.
 John’s mother is over there. = His mother is over there.
 The visit will be an overnight visit. = This will be an overnight visit.
Punctuation
Anything written which isn’t the spelling or grammar!
Examples: . , ? ! “ ” – : ; ( ) ‘ ’
Prefix
Root word
Alert!! Capital letters, spaces between words, apostrophes, bullet points
and paragraphs are all a part of punctuation.
A prefix changes the meaning of words by adding letters to the beginning
of the word.
Examples:
 Un + fortunate = Unfortunate
 Dis + comfort = Discomfort
Words are made up of root words, which can stand alone, and prefixes
and suffixes, which can’t stand alone. Prefixes and suffixes have to be
attached to a root word.
Examples:
 Root word = help.
unhelpful, helpless
 Root word = care
Careful, caring

Root word = use
Disused, usefully.
Sentence
Alert!! Knowing a root word is really helpful when you are using a
dictionary. If you want to know how to spell ‘disused’, try looking up the
root word ‘use’ and ‘disused’ should be next to it!
A sentence is a group of words which are grammatically connected to
each other but not to any words outside the sentence. There are
different types of sentences:




Standard
English
Stress
Statement. You are my friend.
Question. Are you my friend?
Instruction. Be my friend!
Exclamation. You’re such a great friend!
Alert!! A sentence may be one clause, or several clauses!
Standard English is the English we want you to use in school! Standard
English is the grammatically correct English which is used by Englishspeaking people all over the world, in any accent. Standard English can be
any register, but it is always grammatically accurate.
Examples:
 I wrote it. NOT I writ it.
 I’ve done my homework. NOT I done my homework.
 That’s the Reception kid who keeps following me. NOT That’s the
Reception kid what keeps following me.
A syllable is stressed if we say it with more force than the other
syllables in the word.
Examples:
 sandwich
 Important
 independent
Suffix
Syllable
A suffix changes the meaning of words by adding letters to ending of the
word.
Examples: Hope + ful = Hopeful
A syllable sounds like a beat in a word. Every word contains one or more
syllables. Every syllable contains a vowel.
Examples:
 chip (1 syllable)



Synonym
sausage (2 syllables)
hamburger (3 syllables)
macaroni (4 syllables)
Alert!! Put your hand under your chin. Every time you say a new syllable,
your jaw moves!
Two words are synonyms if they have the same meaning, or similar
meanings.
Examples:
 talk = speak
 old = elderly
 child = kid
 terrible = atrocious
Tense
Alert!! The opposite of a synonym is an antonym.
Verbs can be either in the present or past tense.
Examples:
 Present tense = I’m shouting. I shout out answers.
 Past tense = I shouted down the street. I was shouting at the TV
when Chelsea scored!
Trigraph
Verb
Vowel
Word
Alert!! In English, we only change our verbs into the present or the past
tense, in other languages – like French, Spanish and Italian – they have 3
or more verb tenses!
A trigraph is a type of grapheme where three letters represent one
word.
Examples:
 High
 Pure
 Patch
 hedge
Verbs are ‘doing’ or ‘being’ words.
Examples: Alex talked to the teacher.
Kelly ran 100 metres.
They are so excited for the party!
The vowels in English are A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. A vowel is a
speech sound which you make straight from your voice box.
A word is a unit of grammar. It can be said or written on its own, or
moved around in a sentence, but the letters inside a word can’t be split
up. When we are writing, we show a word is fixed together by leaving a
space between each word.
Example:
My handwriting is better than the teacher’s!
Not: Myhandwritingisbetterthantheteacher’s!
Word class
A word class describes the way a word can be used. We use word classes
a lot when we are talking about grammar and most of them are explained
in this glossary! Some of the major word classes are:






Noun: alien, lunchbox, phone, thought
Verb: wiggle, think, creep, sing
Adjective: tiny, chilly, ferocious, sublime
Adverb: suddenly, quickly, hurriedly, fast
Preposition: in, at, on, under
Pronoun: he, she, we, it
Word family A word family is words that are related to each other but look slightly
different (like our families!). Word families are connected by
morphology.
Examples:
 teach – teacher – teaching – teaches – taught
 extend – extent – extending – extensive – extended
 grammar – grammatical – grammarian
Created by Miss Ballantine & Miss Evans from the 2014 English National Curriculum.