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Air can be a verb or a noun.

air used as a verb:

  1. To bring (something) into contact with the air, so as to freshen or dry it.
  2. To let fresh air into a room or a building, to ventilate.
    "It's getting quite stuffy in this room: let's open the windows and air it."
  3. To discuss varying viewpoints on a given topic.
  4. To broadcast, as with a television show.

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 →

air used as a noun:

  1. The atmospheric substance above the surface of the earth which animals breathe, formerly considered to be a single substance, one of the four basic elements of ancient philosophy and one of the five basic elements of Eastern traditions.
  2. Now understood as the mixture of gases comprising the earth's atmosphere.
    "The karate instructor said "air is the one thing you can't go five minutes without; when you spar, you have to remember to breathe.""
  3. The apparently open space above the ground; the mass of this substance around the earth.
    "The flock of birds took to the air."
  4. A feeling or sense.
    "...to give it an air of artistry and sophistication."
  5. A sense of poise, graciousness, or quality.
  6. Pretension; snobbishness; pretence that one is better than others.
  7. A song, especially a solo; an aria.
  8. An air conditioner or the processed air it produces.
    "Could you turn on the air?"
  9. Any specific gas.
  10. A jump in which one becomes airborne.

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 →

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What type of word is air?

As detailed above, 'air' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: It's getting quite stuffy in this room: let's open the windows and air it.
  2. Noun usage: The karate instructor said "air is the one thing you can't go five minutes without; when you spar, you have to remember to breathe."
  3. Noun usage: The flock of birds took to the air.
  4. Noun usage: There was a tension in the air which made me suspect an approaching storm.
  5. Noun usage: ...to give it an air of artistry and sophistication.
  6. Noun usage: Could you turn on the air?

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