Topic summary
Grammatical words
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Function word.
Overview
Grammatical words, as a class, can have distinct phonological properties from content words. For example, in some of the Khoisan languages, most content words begin with clicks, but very few function words do. In English, very few words other than function words begin with the voiced th[ð]. English function words may be spelled with fewer than three letters; e.g., 'I', 'an', 'in', while non-function words usually are spelled with three or more (e.g., 'eye', 'Ann', 'inn').