Part-of-Speech Tagging

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging identifies the grammatical category of each word. spaCy provides both Universal (coarse) and Detailed (fine-grained) tags.

---

Universal POS Tags

Open Class Words (content words)

• NOUN – Noun
• VERB – Verb
• ADJ – Adjective
• ADV – Adverb
• PROPN – Proper Noun
• INTJ – Interjection (oh, wow, oops)

Closed Class Words (function words)

• DET – Determiner (the, a, this)
• ADP – Adposition: prepositions and postpositions (in, to, during)
• PRON – Pronoun
• NUM – Numeral
• AUX – Auxiliary
• CCONJ – Coordinating Conjunction (and, or, but)
• SCONJ – Subordinating Conjunction (if, while, because)
• PART – Particle (not, 's, to in infinitives)

Other

• PUNCT – Punctuation
• SYM – Symbol ($, %, @)
• X – Other (foreign words, typos)

---

Detailed Tags (Penn Treebank)

Fine-grained English-specific tags

• NN – Noun, Singular; NNS – Noun, Plural
• NNP – Proper Noun, Singular; NNPS – Proper Noun, Plural
• VB – Verb, Base Form
• VBD – Verb, Past Tense
• VBG – Verb, Gerund/Present Participle
• VBN – Verb, Past Participle
• VBP – Verb, Non-3rd Person Singular Present
• VBZ – Verb, 3rd Person Singular Present
• JJ – Adjective; JJR – Adjective, Comparative; JJS – Adjective, Superlative
• RB – Adverb; RBR – Adverb, Comparative; RBS – Adverb, Superlative
• PRP – Personal Pronoun; PRP$ – Possessive Pronoun
• DT – Determiner
• IN – Preposition or Subordinating Conjunction
• CC – Coordinating Conjunction
• CD – Cardinal Number

---