parse

[pahrs, pahrz]

verb (used with object)

parsed, parsing 

1. to analyze (a sentence) in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc.

2. to describe (a word in a sentence) grammatically, identifying the part of speech, inflectional form, syntactic function, etc.

3. to analyze (something, as a speech or behavior) to discover its implications or uncover a deeper meaning.

   Political columnists were in their glory, parsing the president's speech on the economy in minute detail.

4. Computers.,  to analyze (a string of characters) in order to associate groups of characters with the syntactic units of the underlying grammar.

verb (used without object)

parsed, parsing 

1. to be able to be parsed; lend itself to parsing.

   Sorry, but your concluding paragraph simply doesn't parse.

parse

/ pɑːz /

verb

1. to assign constituent structure to (a sentence or the words in a sentence)

2. (intr) (of a word or linguistic element) to play a specified role in the structure of a sentence

3. computing to analyse the source code of a computer program to make sure that it is structurally correct before it is compiled and turned into machine code

Other Word Forms

• parsable adjective
• parser noun
• misparse verb (used with object)
• unparsed adjective
• parsing noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of parse¹

First recorded in 1545–55; from Latin pars “part,” as in pars ōrātiōnis “part of speech”

Word History and Origins

Origin of parse¹

C16: from Latin pars ( orātionis ) part (of speech)

Example Sentences

FanDuel is owned by a British gambling conglomerate, so its U.S. sports revenue is difficult to parse.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

It used cleverly parsed terms—“premium payments” rather than “premiums”—to conflate total premiums with enrollees’ out-of-pocket payments.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Investors, economists and the Fed will have other data to parse if the shutdown lingers.

Read more on Barron's

But we don't need to parse his semantic description of the exchange to know that this was not the meeting that the Ukrainian side had been expecting.

Read more on BBC

Under normal circumstances, Wall Street would be preparing to parse through September’s retail sales report Thursday morning—but these aren’t normal circumstances.

Read more on Barron's

Related Words

• audit 
• check 
• check out 
• consider 
• criticize 
• delve into www.thesaurus.com
• explore 
• inspect 
• investigate 
• ponder 
• pore over www.thesaurus.com
• probe 
• read 
• research 
• review 
• scan 
• screen 
• scrutinize 
• study 
• survey