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Act can be a noun or a verb.

act used as a noun:

  1. Something done, a deed.
    "An act of good will."
  2. A state of existence.
  3. A product of a legislative body, a statute.
  4. The process of doing something.
    "He was caught in the act."
  5. A formal or official record of something done.
  6. A division of a theatrical performance.
    "The pivotal moment in the play was in the first scene of the second act."
  7. A display of behavior.

Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →

act used as a verb:

  1. To do something.
    "If you don't act soon, you will be in trouble."
  2. To perform a theatrical role.
    "I started acting at the age of eleven in my local theatre."
  3. To behave in a certain way.
    "He's acting strangely - I think there's something wrong with him."
  4. To convey an appearance of being.
    "He acted unconcerned so the others wouldn't worry."
  5. To have an effect (on).
    "High-pressure oxygen acts on the central nervous system and may cause convulsions or death."
  6. To play (a role).
    "He's been acting Shakespearean leads since he was twelve."
  7. To feign.
    "He acted the angry parent, but was secretly amused."
  8. To map via a homomorphism to a group of automorphisms (of).
    "This group acts on the circle, so it can't be left-orderable!"

Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →

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What type of word is act?

As detailed above, 'act' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: An act of good will.
  2. Noun usage: He was caught in the act.
  3. Noun usage: The pivotal moment in the play was in the first scene of the second act.
  4. Verb usage: If you don't act soon, you will be in trouble.
  5. Verb usage: I started acting at the age of eleven in my local theatre.
  6. Verb usage: He's acting strangely - I think there's something wrong with him.
  7. Verb usage: He acted unconcerned so the others wouldn't worry.
  8. Verb usage: High-pressure oxygen acts on the central nervous system and may cause convulsions or death.
  9. Verb usage: Gravitational force acts on heavy bodies.
  10. Verb usage: He's been acting Shakespearean leads since he was twelve.
  11. Verb usage: He acted the angry parent, but was secretly amused.
  12. Verb usage: This group acts on the circle, so it can't be left-orderable!

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of act 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 act, 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).

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