Other forms: grammars
Grammar is the set of rules that decide how words fit together — word order, endings, tenses, which small words go where. It is why a teacher's red pen lands on 'he don't' and not on the spelling.
A grammar is also the book of those rules, so one shelf can hold three grammars of Spanish. The adjective is grammatical: a sentence is grammatical or ungrammatical, and there is no such word as 'grammatic'. In Britain, a grammar school is a state school that picks its pupils by an exam at eleven. People say 'my grammar is terrible' about punctuation and spelling too, though those are separate skills. Two Ms, and it ends -ar, which is the half of the spelling everyone gets wrong.
1noungrammarThe rules for putting words together in a language.~70%
“Her grammar is better than her spelling.”
2nounbookA book that describes those rules.~30%
“He keeps a Latin grammar by the bed.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
grammar is a system of rules.
Grammar came through Old French gramaire, where it meant classical learning of any kind, from Latin grammatica and Greek grammatikē, 'skilled in writing', from gramma, 'a line of writing'. To people who could not read, book learning looked like magic — and the same word, worn down in Scots, became glamour. Grammar and glamour are the same word, which will comfort nobody sitting a grammar test.
Proto-Indo-European
*gerbʰ- — to carve, scratch
Ancient Greek
γραμματική — skilled in writing
Latin
grammatica
Vulgar Latin
*grammāria
Old French
gramaire — classical learning
Middle English
gramere
English, today
grammar
Built from
From Middle English gramere, from Old French gramaire (“classical learning”), from unattested Vulgar Latin grammāria, an alteration of Latin grammatica, from Ancient Greek γραμματική (“skilled in writing”), from γράμμα (“line of writing”), from γράφω (“write”), from Proto-Indo-European gerbʰ- (“to carve, scratch”). Displaced native stæfcræft; a a doublet of glamour and glamoury and gramarye and grimoire. grammatic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA