word order

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

These include word order preferences, such as whether verbs come before or after objects, and hierarchical structures, such as how grammatical relationships are marked within sentences.

From Science Daily • Apr. 5, 2026

Several researchers noted “more short sentences, confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions.”

From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 25, 2024

German, she says, is often described as having free word order, but when the same experiment was run in German by another researcher, speakers used the same order more than 75 percent of the time.

From Scientific American • Oct. 18, 2023

Adger taught the study participants different versions of Nápíjò, in which the noun placement in this word order was the opposite of in their native tongue: first for English speakers, last for Thai.

From Slate • Oct. 30, 2019

It’s just one way to display syntax on a page, and not a particularly good one, with user-unfriendly features such as scrambled word order and arbitrary graphical conventions.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker