Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actions, adjectives to refer to attributes of entities, and adverbs to attributes of actions. They contrast with function words, which have very little substantive meaning and primarily denote grammatical relationships between content words, such as prepositions (in, out, under etc.), pronouns (I, you, he, who etc.) and conjunctions (and, but, till, as etc.).
Content words are usually open class words, and new words are easily added to the language. In relation to English phonology, content words generally adhere to the minimal word constraint of being no shorter than two morae long (a minimum length of two light syllables or one heavy syllable), but function words often do not.
See also
- Lexical verb
- Grammaticalization, the process by which words may change from content to function words