Glossary
phrase
A phrase is a group of related words that works as one part of speech and has no subject-verb pair of its own.
A phrase is a group of words acting together as a single unit, without a subject and a verb of its own. In the east wing, after the dressing change, having taken the vital signs and the patient in bed four are all phrases: each does one job in a sentence — a prepositional phrase telling where or when, a participial phrase describing, a noun phrase naming — but none of them could be a sentence. That is what separates a phrase from a clause, which does contain a subject and a verb, and the distinction is what sentence-error questions turn on: a phrase left by itself is a fragment, while a phrase attached to the wrong noun is a misplaced or dangling modifier. A phrase can be long and can contain a verb form, which is why having taken the vital signs looks like a clause; what it lacks is a subject doing that taking.
Taught in
Related terms
- clause — A clause is a group of words with its own subject and verb; an independent clause can stand as a sentence, a dependent one cannot.
- modifier — A modifier is a word or phrase that describes another word, and it belongs as close as possible to the word it describes.
- dangling modifier — A dangling modifier is a descriptive phrase left with nothing in the sentence to describe — its intended subject is missing, so the sentence says something absurd.
- part of speech — A part of speech is the job a word is doing in a particular sentence — noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction or interjection — not a label the word carries with it.
Source: The grammar guide in this course, whose conventions follow the US Government Publishing Office's Style Manual for standard written American English, with standard grammar references for agreement, case, tense and sentence structure. The GPO manual is US federal government material, not subject to copyright in the United States. Every definition and example above was written for this course; no reference text is reproduced. (GPO Style Manual accessed 2026-10-27; definitions written 2026-10-27)