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A particle is a word that is normally uninflected, and often has little clear meaning, but has an important function in a sentence or phrase, and is therefore called a function word. It is distinct from the other words in the sentence, but may reflect the attitude or even the mood of the speaker or narrator of the text, or may act as a sentence connector to the previous sentence or clause.
Many linguists classify adverbs and prepositions as particles. Conjunctions may also count as particles when they correlate clauses in a sentence.
Interjections expressing attitude, mood, or state of mind may also be classified as particles. Yet another type of particle is the sentence substitutes. Sentence substitutes are sometimes single words that can stand on their own and take the place of a whole sentence, such as "Hello", or "Goodbye", or "Yes". The word "to" in an infinitive is considered to be a particle, though it is worth noting that it is not mandatory. (See infinitive and split infinitive). In the context of indicating the indirect object, "to" is also a particle. It is equivalent to the dative case in other languages. The word "not" is a particle because it and an auxiliary verb serve to negate a sentence. This is functionally equivalent to the negative mood.
As can be seen, the greater number of particles are relatively short words. However, there are also "particle phrases" (adverbial phrases), such as "of course", "as it were", etc., which remain unchanged and separate from other words within the sentence, although they may contain inflected elements, such as "were". Also the so-called tag questions, such as "isn't it(?)", "won't he(?)", "doesn't it(?)", etc. which generally go at the end of the sentence, fall under this category, in that they have a reinforcing or reassuring function, or a sentence connection function, or even indicate the mood of attitude of the speaker/narrator.
Also, words such as "the" (the articles with noun); the "to" (in infinitives) and the determiners "more", "most", "less", "least" (in comparatives and superlatives) should be regarded as particles as they themselves are not inflected, but belong to other words that are. Yet it must be conceded that they are not isolated in the way particles normally are, since they are part of an over-all grammatical inflection.
However, if particles change into nouns or verbs, they take on the affixes of the inflections of these nouns and verbs, such as in "ifs and buts", or "humming and hawing" (of the interjection "hum").
Grammatical particles are particularly important in colloquial speech, which probably would not be able to convey many special shades of meaning without them. It is the subtle use of particles in phrases such as "now then, what's all this"; "so what"; "you spoke to her, then"?; "anyway, there I was"; "still, it could have been a lot worse"; and many others that make communication in colloquial speech so rich.
You can remember this with the handy mnemonic FANBOYS.
Some use and/or in writing.
See also: Postposition
In Japanese and Korean (which are unrelated languages but have almost identical grammars), particles are used to mark nouns according to their case or their role (subject, object, complement, or topic) in a sentence or clause. In Korean, particles are considered as a distinct part of speech.
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