.tools/POS Tags

Begin to break down the grammar of the Bible.

In the computer science field called Natural Language Processing (NLP), a first step in using a computer to help make sense of a document is to note each word's grammatical part-of-speech (POS) by assigning each word a POS tag. Examples of tags are VB for a verb in its base form, like "depart," and VBD for a verb in its past tense, like "departed." NN is a singular common noun, like "father," and NNP is a singular proper noun, like "Abraham."

Selecting a tag opens a list of every word with that part-of-speech, including the count of times each word appears as such. Click on a "Word" or "Count" column header to sort the list.

While basic parts-of-speech like verb, noun, pronoun, and adjective, are widely understood, others, like coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, and modal auxiliary verbs, are often not, but better grammar skills lead to better Bible study skills. Also, what makes up the most useful complete set of part-of-speech tags is subjective. BibleStudy.tools uses the tagset of the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) software, which is based on the Upenn (University of Pennsylvania) tagset, also called the Penn Treebank tagset. This tagset has been modified because the Bible is a unique piece of English literature, and God is apparently not intimidated by any standards set up by any grammarians.