<P> A century or two after the work of Nirukta, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in his Cratylus dialog that "...sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs (rhêma) and nouns (ónoma)". Aristotle added another class, "conjunction" (sýndesmos), which included not only the words known today as conjunction, but also other parts (the interpretations differ, in one interpretation it is pronouns, prepositions, and the article). </P> <P> By the end of the 2nd century BC grammarians had expanded this classification scheme into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax: </P> <Ol> <Li> Noun (ónoma): a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity </Li> <Li> Verb (rhêma): a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone </Li> <Li> Participle (metokhḗ): a part of speech sharing features of the verb and the noun </Li> <Li> Article (árthron): a declinable part of speech, taken to include the definite article, but also the basic relative pronoun </Li> <Li> Pronoun (antōnymíā): a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person </Li> <Li> Preposition (próthesis): a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax </Li> <Li> Adverb (epírrhēma): a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb </Li> <Li> Conjunction (sýndesmos): a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation </Li> </Ol> <Li> Noun (ónoma): a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity </Li>

The word was is what part of speech