.tools/POS Tags

Begin to break down the grammar of the Bible.

In the computer science field of Natural Language Processing, or NLP, a first step in using a computer to help you get understanding of a document is noting each word's grammatical part-of-speech, or 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."

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 POS tags are based on the tagset of the Natural Language Toolkit software, or NLTK. 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.

Edited Tags

Select "Edited Tags" to list all Bible words who's tag you've changed. You change a word's tag from the Concordance page, and the help there explains how to do that. After making tag edits you can come here to review them all, and if you want to contribute your changes to the site's tagging project then copy and paste your list of edits from here and put it into a message on the Contact page. The "Submit Edits" button is a shortcut to fill this in for you and take you to the Contact page. Remember that you don't have to submit all your edited tags; you can remove tags from the contact form message before you send it.

All Tags

View a list of all allowed POS tags, along with a short description and some summary count info for each tag. Select a "Sort by" option to sort the tag list. Select a tag to open a detailed list of every word with that part-of-speech, along with the count of times each word appears as such, then select that tag again to close the list. Click on a "Word" or "Count" column header in a detailed list to sort it.

The summary counts don't include your edited tags, but the detailed word counts do.