e, ink, and press by means of which he puts them there.

In the third place, knowledge of words and their uses is indispensable
to correct proofreading which is itself a branch of the printer's craft.
A working knowledge of words and their relations, that is, of rhetoric
and grammar is therefore a tool and a very important tool of the
printer.

This little book is not intended to be either a rhetoric or a grammar.
It is only intended to review some of the simplest principles of both
subjects, to point out a few of the commonest mistakes, and to show the
importance to the apprentice of the careful study and constant use of
some of the many books on words, their combinations, and their uses.

_The Word Families_

All the words in the English language belong to one or another of nine
families, each of which family has a special duty. If you will always
remember to which family a word belongs and just what that family does,
you will be saved from many very common errors. These nine families
are: 1, nouns; 2, adjectives; 3, articles; 4, verbs; 5, pronouns; 6,
adverbs; 7, prepositions; 8, conjunctions; 9, interjections. This order
of enumeration is not exactly the same as will be found in the grammars.
It is used here because it indicates roughly the order of the appearance
of the nine families in the logical development of language. Some forms
of interjections, however, may very probably have preceded any language
properly so called.

_Nouns_

A noun is a word used as the name of anything that can be thought of,
_John_, _boy_, _paper_, _cold_, _fear_, _crowd_. There are three things
about a noun which indicate its relation to other words, its number, its
gender, and its case. There are two numbers, singular meaning one, and
plural meaning more than one.

The plural is generally formed by adding _s_ to the singular. There are
a small number of nouns which form their plurals differently, _mouse_,
_mice_; _child_, _children_; _foot_, _feet_. These must be learned
individually from a dictionary or spelling book. There are some nouns
which undergo changes in the final syllable when the _s_ is added,
_torch_, _torches_; _staff_, _staves_; _fly_, _flies_. These also must
be learned individually. There are some nouns which have no singular,
such as _cattle_, _clothes_, some which have no plural, such as
_physics_, _honesty_, _news_, and some which are the same in both
singular and plural, such as _deer_, _tro