What is a Determiner?

Determiners are one of the nine parts of speech. They are words like the, an, this, some, either, myor whose. All determiners share some grammatical similarities:

• Determiners come at the beginning of a noun phrase, before adjectives.
• Determiners limit or “determine” a noun phrase in some way.
• Many determiners are “mutually-exclusive”: we cannot have more than one of them in the same noun phrase.
• If we do have more than one determiner, they go in a very specific order.

Look at these example noun phrases. The first word in each noun phrase is a determiner:

• the dog
• those people
• some brown rice
• either side of the road
• seven pink elephants
• your oldest child
• which car