parse

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. v. To break (a sentence) down into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.
2. v. To describe (a word) by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationships in a sentence.
3. v. To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components: "What are we missing by parsing the behavior of chimpanzees into the conventional categories recognized largely from our own behavior?” ( Stephen Jay Gould).
4. v. To make sense of; comprehend: I simply couldn't parse what you just said.
5. v. Computer Science To analyze or separate (input, for example) into more easily processed components.
6. v. To admit of being parsed: sentences that do not parse easily.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. In grammar, to describe grammatically by telling the part of speech of, as a word, or of each word in, as a sentence, defining and describing its grammatical form, and showing its relation to the other words in the sentence; resolve, as a sentence, into its grammatical parts: as, to parse a line in Virgil.
2. An obsolete form of pierce.

Wiktionary

1. v. linguistics To resolve into its elements, as a sentence, pointing out the several parts of speech, and their relation to each other by government or agreement; to analyze and describe grammatically.
2. v. computing To split a file or other input into bits of data that can be easily stored or manipulated.
3. n. linguistics, computing A successful act of parsing.
4. n. linguistics, computing The result of such an act.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. v. (Gram.) To resolve into its elements, as a sentence, pointing out the several parts of speech, and their relation to each other by government or agreement; to analyze and describe grammatically.

WordNet 3.0

1. v. analyze syntactically by assigning a constituent structure to (a sentence)