Many Hats
A word's part of speech is its job, not its spelling. Mock is Vinny's verb when it means to make fun, and Jake's adjective when it means a practice version, the same word doing two different jobs.
The Mayor calls the cross-talk: one word can wear two hats, and which character owns it depends on the job it is doing in the sentence.
The full Word Hoard cycle is coming.
One word that wears more than one hat.
Play it in the Arcade.
Take it onto the floor with the live game. Free, and it plays daily.
One word, many hats. Send each word to the character whose job it is doing, then drop one word into two frames and watch it change its part of speech.
Play Many Hats →Two hats is not the same as two words.
Peer and pier sound exactly the same, but they are two separate words. A pier is a dock that reaches out over the water. It only ever does that one job. Sounding alike does not make it the same word wearing a second hat.
Peer is one word that wears two hats: Nelson's noun, a person who is your equal (her peers in the music world), and Vinny's verb, to look closely (I peer through the fog). Same word, same spelling, two jobs.
A real vocabulary skill, Grades 1 through 8.
Many Hats is one of the seven ways Grammaropolis teaches vocabulary, each mapped to a Common Core vocabulary strand. The Wonderful Words workbooks are standards-cited today across Common Core, Texas TEKS, Florida B.E.S.T., and New York Next Gen, and the per-grade digital alignment arrives with the cycle.
Teachers know these as word-learning strategies.
CCSS L.x.4.a and L.x.1 (a word's part of speech in context).
See it in the Standards Explorer →Other ways to know a word.
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