Meet the preposition | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hey Garans, I want to talk about prepositions. But before I do, I'm going to draw you a little hamster. Is it a hamster? Is it a tiny bear? Who knows? We're just going to call it a hamster, a little, little rodent-type creature.

Now, I'm going to use this critter to establish what prepositions are and what they do. Because in addition to there being a hamster, there's also going to be this, uh, this box. So, what prepositions do is they establish relationships between stuff in place and time.

So, it can show us where things are, when things are, and how things are. Let me demonstrate. So, okay, using just this hamster and this box, we can move this box around and talk about how the hamster relates to the box. Right now, the box is under the hamster. Let's write that down. Right, the box is under the hamster. That word "under" is a preposition because it's establishing this relationship of where. It's connecting the box to the hamster.

The box is under the hamster. But if I move it up like so, now we can say the box is over the hamster. But let's get rid of the box and let's imagine that our hamster is having a midlife crisis. Our hamster decides it's going to go out and it's going to splurge on a fabulous new hat.

Just an enormous top hat, little band in the center. It's a big old silly Abe Lincoln-style stovepipe top hat. Now, another use for prepositions is we can talk about when things are in relation to each other. So, I could say before the hamster got the hat and after the hamster got the hat. Right?

And these words "after" and "before" express relationships in time. But another interesting thing that prepositions can do is they can also help express how something is or how it's—what it's for, what its use is. You know, so we could say, um, that you know this hat is for parties or is for wearing at parties. Oh, and "at" also is a preposition. This hat is for wearing at parties.

So this is the how, and this part is the where. So what's the purpose of the hat? Well, we establish that with the word "for." The hat is for wearing. Where is it supposed to be worn? At parties. That's the where. We can also use a word like "of" to express, um, the how relationship.

And that's just sort of to say what belongs to whom. So we could say, you know, that is the hat of the hamster. That is the hat of the hamster. So that's what prepositions are in the most basic sense. They can help you figure out what the relationship is between two things in time and space. You know, or how one thing relates to another.

So you can figure out when, where, and how using prepositions. You can learn anything. Daveid out.