Parsing is the analysis of a sentence grammatically, telling its parts of speech and their uses in the sentence. The term parsing comes from the Latin pars, meaning part.
In parsing a sentence like The boy found a penny, a student might say: (1) Boy is a common noun, third person, singular number, masculine gender, nominative case, and subject of the verb found. (2) Found is a transitive, finite, predicating verb, third person, singular number, active voice, indicative mood, and past tense. (3) Penny is a common noun, third person, singular number, neuter gender, objective case, and object of the verb found.
Much of this analysis is unnecessary, and even misleading. For example, it may be meaningful to say that boy is a common noun, but not that it is third person, because all nouns are third person. English nouns do not distinguish between subject and object forms. The case of boy would be described as common (see Case ).
Most schools have abandoned parsing as a method of teaching and have replaced it with sentence diagramming (see Sentence ).
See also Parts of speech .
