Word Type
About can be an adverb or a preposition.
about used as an adverb:
- On all sides; around.
"'Tis time to look about. - Shakespeare, King Lear, IV-vii" - In circuit; circularly; by a circuitous way; around the outside; as, a mile about, and a third of a mile across.
- Here and there; around; in one place and another.
"Wandering about from house to house. - 1 Timothy 5:13" - Nearly; approximately; with close correspondence, in quality, manner, degree, etc.; as, about as cold; about as high; -- also of quantity, number, time.
"There fell ... about three thousand men. - Exodus 22:28" - To a reserved position; half round; in the opposite direction; on the opposite tack; as, to face about; to turn one's self about.
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
about used as a preposition:
- Around; all round; outside or on every side of.
- In the immediate neighborhood of; in contiguity or proximity to; near, as to place; by or on (one's person).
- Over or upon different parts of; through or over in various directions; here and there in; to and fro in; throughout.
- Near; not far from; -- determining approximately time, size, quantity.
- In concern with; engaged in; intent on.
- (Before a verbal noun or an infinitive): On the point or verge of; going; in act of.
- Concerning; with regard to; on account of; touching.
Prepositions are used to show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word. Examples of prepositions are: in, during, beside, after, for. In the sentence "Sows suffer in factory farms." The preposition "in" tells us the position of the sow relative to the factory farm. Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is about?
- Adverb usage: 'Tis time to look about. - Shakespeare, King Lear, IV-vii
- Adverb usage: Wandering about from house to house. - 1 Timothy 5:13
- Adverb usage: There fell ... about three thousand men. - Exodus 22:28
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of about are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of about, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).