syntactic

syntactic — adjective

1. Relating to the rules that govern how words are arranged to form phrases and sen

1.adjectiveB2
Definition

Relating to the rules that govern how words are arranged to form phrases and sentences in a language.

Example

Lisa struggled with the syntactic rules of English when writing her first academic essay.

collocation: syntactic rules

Although Chinese and English share some vocabulary, their syntactic patterns differ greatly.

collocation: syntactic patterns

Common collocations
  • syntactic rules
  • syntactic structure
  • syntactic pattern
  • syntactic analysis
  • syntactic category
  • syntactic constituent
Synonyms
  • grammatical

    Broader in scope — includes morphology and overall correctness, not just word order

  • structural

    More general — can apply to any system (buildings, music, organisations), not just language

  • syntactical

    Rarer variant of 'syntactic'; identical in meaning but far less frequent in modern usage

Grammar Patterns

syntactic + noun (e.g. rules, structure, pattern)

Usage Note

This sense is most common in linguistics and language teaching. In everyday conversation, 'grammatical' is used more broadly to describe well-formed sentences; 'syntactic' refers specifically to word-order and sentence-level structure, not to spelling or meaning.

Common Mistakes

The sentence has a syntactic error because the word is misspelled.
The sentence has a syntactic error because the word order is wrong.
Syntactic errors relate to arrangement, not spelling.
Syntactic' and 'syntactical' have different meanings.
Syntactic' and 'syntactical' are interchangeable; 'syntactic' is simply more common and preferred in academic writing.

2. Relating to the rules that control how instructions and statements are correctly

2.adjectiveB2
Definition

Relating to the rules that control how instructions and statements are correctly formed in a computer programming language.

Example

The compiler reported a syntactic error in the third line of Caio's Python script.

collocation: syntactic error

Sahil fixed the syntactic mistakes in his JavaScript code before it would run.

collocation: syntactic mistake

Common collocations
  • syntactic error
  • syntactic mistake
  • syntactic analysis
  • syntactic checker
  • syntactic validation
Synonyms
  • syntax-related

    More informal; often used as a compound adjective ('a syntax-related problem')

  • lexical

    Refers to the level of individual tokens/words in code, distinct from the sentence-level syntactic rules

Grammar Patterns

syntactic + noun (e.g. error, mistake, analysis)

Usage Note

In computing contexts, 'syntactic' is often used in the phrases 'syntactic error' and 'syntactic analysis'. A syntactic error (also called a 'syntax error') means the code breaks the programming language's formatting rules and cannot be compiled or interpreted.

Word family

  • syntax
    nounB2
  • syntactical
    adjectiveC1
  • syntactically
    adverbC1

Synonym discussion

Sense: adjective/1

While 'syntactic' and 'syntactical' are interchangeable — both mean the same thing — 'syntactical' is now much rarer and sounds dated or overly academic. 'Grammatical' is broader: it covers everything about well-formed language, including morphology (word forms), punctuation, and meaning, whereas 'syntactic' focuses specifically on word order and sentence-level arrangement. 'Structural' is the most general of the three, applying to any system with arranged parts — a building, a musical composition, or an organisation — not just language. For example, you would say 'a grammatical error in the verb tense' but 'a syntactic error in the word order', while 'a structural flaw in the argument' works in a non-linguistic context.

syntacticalgrammatical ↗structural ↗

Common collocations

Nouns

Etymology

GreekLatinFrenchEnglish

Comes from Greek 'syntaxis' (σύνταξις), formed from 'syn-' meaning 'together' and 'tassein' meaning 'to arrange'. The word passed through Latin 'syntaxis' and French 'syntaxique' before entering English. The computing sense — referring to the structure of programming language statements — emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as computer science developed its own vocabulary.