Grammatic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Concerned with the system of rules that dictate how language is structured and used
2. Associated with the principles that guide language construction and proper usage within communication
3. Pertaining to the set of rules that govern the structure and use of a language

Etymology: "Grammatic" is a doublet of "grammatical," a pairing that shows the same Latin source entering English twice. It descends from Latin "grammaticus," meaning "of letters" or "of grammar," itself taken from Greek "grammatikos," which related to "gramma," a letter of the alphabet. Grammar, in its earliest sense, was therefore the study of written letters and the texts made from them, long before it came to mean rules of sentence structure. English had a version of the word early. Old English speakers had "grammatiċ," borrowed directly from the same Latin adjective, so the adjective has been in the language for a very long time. Later, "grammatical" arrived from Latin by a separate, later route, and the two forms settled into near-synonyms, with "grammatic" now the rarer, more formal-sounding choice.

Synonyms: grammatical, syntactic, linguistic, language-related, morphological