the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences
"The programmer struggled to debug the code because the compiler kept rejecting his syntax errors."
a systematic orderly arrangement
"The architect praised the building's syntax for its systematic orderly arrangement of light, space, and structural elements."
studies of the rules for forming admissible sentences
"As a linguistics student, I spent my entire summer analyzing syntax to understand how speakers construct grammatically correct sentences from limited word choices."
A set of rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences.
"The programmer spent hours debugging because she misunderstood the language's syntax for creating conditional statements."
In plain English: Syntax is the set of rules that determines how words are arranged to form correct sentences.
"The programmer checked the code's syntax to ensure there were no errors before running the program."
Usage: Syntax refers specifically to the grammatical structure of sentences, not just any arrangement of ideas or code. Use this term when discussing word order and sentence construction rather than general logic or style.
The word syntax comes from the Ancient Greek σύνταξις, which literally means "an arrangement together." It entered English as a doublet of the Latin form syntaxis to describe the rules governing sentence structure.