Parser

[pahrs, pahrz] /pɑrs, pɑrz/

verb (used with object), parsed, parsing.
1.
to analyze (a sentence) in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc.
2.
to describe (a word in a sentence) grammatically, identifying the part of speech, inflectional form, syntactic function, etc.
3.
to analyze (something, as a speech or behavior) to discover its implications or uncover a deeper meaning:
Political columnists were in their glory, parsing the president’s speech on the economy in minute detail.
4.
Computers. to analyze (a string of characters) in order to associate groups of characters with the syntactic units of the underlying grammar.
verb (used without object), parsed, parsing.
5.
to be able to be parsed; lend itself to parsing:
Sorry, but your concluding paragraph simply doesn’t parse.
/ˈpɑːzə/
noun
1.
(computing) a program or part of a program that interprets input to a computer by recognizing key words or analysing sentence structure
/pɑːz/
verb (grammar)
1.
to assign constituent structure to (a sentence or the words in a sentence)
2.
(intransitive) (of a word or linguistic element) to play a specified role in the structure of a sentence
3.
(computing) to analyse the source code of a computer program to make sure that it is structurally correct before it is compiled and turned into machine code
v.

1550s, “to state the parts of speech in a sentence,” verb use of Middle English pars (n.) “part of speech” (c.1300), from Old French pars, plural of part “part,” from Latin pars (see part (n.)) in school question, Quae pars orationis? “What part of speech?” Transferred (non-grammatical) use is from 1788. Pars was a common plural of part (n.) in early Middle English. Related: Parsed; parsing.
language
An algorithm or program to determine the syntactic structure of (“parse”) a sentence or string of symbols in some language. A parser normally takes as input a sequence of tokens output by a lexical analyser. It may produce some kind of abstract syntax tree as output. A parser may be produced automatically from a grammar by a parser generators such as yacc.
A parser is normally part of some larger program, like a compiler, which takes the output of the parser and attempts to extract meaning from it in some way, e.g. translating it into another language.
(2009-06-26)