Part of speech

The term part of speech is a synonym of word class.

Comments
This old term has long been opaque and has tended to be supplanted by other terms in the 20th century, especially word class. However, there are of course many criteria by which one could classify words, so word class is not fully transparent either. It is perhaps for this reason that many linguists continue to use this term, especially in typology (e.g. Hengeveld et al. 2004, van Lier 2006).

Origin
Part of speech is a loan translation of Latin pars orationis, which has been the main Latin term for word classes since antiquity. Oratio means 'speech', but can also be used for 'sentence'.

Other languages

 * French partie du discours
 * German Redeteil
 * Swedish ordklass
 * Russian части речи