Saturday, October 23, 2010

Parse

Parse \PAHRS\ , transitive verb;
1. To resolve (as a sentence) into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part
2. To describe grammatically by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationship in a sentence
3. To examine closely or analyze critically, especially by breaking up into components
4. To make sense of; to comprehend
5. (Computer science) To analyze of seperate (input, for example) into more easily processed components
intransitive verb;
1. To admit of being parsed

According to Etymonline.com:
This word is pretty old, dating from 1550's, meaning "to state the parts of speech in a sentence." It's the verb use of Middle English pars, which is a noun meaning "part of speech." Pars comes from Old French pars, which is the plural of part, meaning "part" and deriving from Latin pars, used in the school question Quae pars orationis?, ("What part of speech?").

*Today's word and the first definition were both taken from Dictionary.com's 'Word of the Day' for Thursday, October 23

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