parse
- 01 C1 Advanced
v.to analyze a sentence by naming its parts, like nouns and verbs, and explaining how they work together.
v.to resolve a sentence into its component parts of speech and describe their grammatical relationship.
Simple“The students had to parse a complex poem to understand its hidden meaning.”
In context“In the introductory linguistics seminar, students were required to parse archaic Latin inscriptions to identify obsolete case endings.”
UsageOften used as a transitive verb taking a sentence or phrase as its object.
Synonyms - 02 C1 Advanced
v.to break a string of data or code into smaller pieces so a computer can understand or use it.
v.to process a string of code or data to determine its syntactic structure relative to a formal grammar.
Simple“The software failed because it could not parse the data from the old file.”
In context“The compiler will not execute the script if the source code fails to parse due to a missing semicolon in the declaration.”
UsageCan be used transitively for the action or intransitively to describe if code is valid.
- 03 C2 Proficiency
v.to look at something very carefully to understand every small detail.
v.to examine or scrutinize something closely in order to extract specific meaning or intent.
Simple“Lawyers had to parse every word of the contract to find any mistakes.”
In context“Political analysts spent hours parsing the minister's speech for any hint of a policy shift regarding international trade.”
Synonyms - 04 C2 Proficiency
n.the act of breaking down information or the result of that analysis.
n.the instance or result of a parsing process, particularly in a computational context.
Simple“The system performed a quick parse of the document to check for errors.”
In context“After the initial parse of the raw telemetry data, the engineers identified a recurring synchronization error in the satellite's transmission.”
UsageUsually a countable noun.
Possibly from Middle English pars (“parts, shares; parts of speech, grammar”), from Old French pars (plural of part (“part, portion, share”)), from Latin pars (“part, piece, share”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *per- (“to carry forth; to sell”).
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.