Content words, inlinguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach,nouns were said to name objects and other entities,lexical verbs to indicate actions,adjectives to refer to attributes of entities, andadverbs to attributes of actions. They contrast withfunction words, which have very little substantive meaning and primarily denote grammatical relationships between content words, such asprepositions (in, out, under etc.),pronouns (I, you, he, who etc.) andconjunctions (and, but, till, as etc.).[1]
All words can be classified as either content or function words, but it is not always easy to make the distinction. With only around 150 function words, 99.9% of words in theEnglish language are content words. Although small in number, function words are used at a disproportionately higher rate than content and make up about 50% of any English text because of the conventional patterns of usage that binds function words to content words almost every time they are used, which creates an interdependence between the two word groups.[1]
Content words are usuallyopen class words, and new words are easily added to the language.[2] In relation toEnglish phonology, content words generally adhere to the minimal word constraint of being no shorter than twomorae long (a minimum length of two light syllables or one heavy syllable), but function words often do not.[3]
The dictionary definition ofcontent word at Wiktionary