What part of speech is the word "King" in this sentence?

Question

The sentence I'm trying to understand is:

King David came to battle with his army.

Is King an adjective or a noun? Kingly David would clearly be an adjective and "The King came to battle" would be a noun, but when used as "Title Given-Name" is the title part of the noun, a proper-noun or just an adjective?

It's better to avoid thinking of PoS "as is" and to start to consider grammatical forms and grammatical functions. The concept of PoS is very limited and potentially misleading if used heedlessly. One good example for showing its limitations is a noun pile; for example, how can we explain that these 7 nouns make up one noun phrase: Air bag malfunction safety recall follow-up notice? — Damkerng T., May 15 '15 at 05:35

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 15 '15 at 02:18

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I would treat "King David" the same as I would treat "Mr. Thurston Howell III", as a proper name that happens to include an honorific. The entire structure works as a single open-form compound word.

answered May 15 '15 at 02:18

Gary Botnovcan

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 03 '23 at 16:23

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king is a noun but here king functions as an adjective because it modifies David. It describes David.

answered Oct 03 '23 at 16:23

Subhash Mahto

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Incorrect. The earlier answer is correct in that King David is a compound noun. – Chenmunka Oct 04 '23 at 08:44

What part of speech is the word "King" in this sentence?

2 Answers2