Word Type
Ball can be a noun, a verb or an interjection.
ball used as a noun:
- A solid or hollow sphere.
- An object, generally spherical, used for playing games.
- A quantity of string, thread, etc., wound into a spherical shape.
"'ball' of wool" - A pitch that falls outside of the strike zone.
- An opportunity to launch the ball into play.
- A solid, spherical nonexplosive missile for a cannon, etc.
- A jacketed non-expanding bullet, typically of military origin.
- The set of points in a metric space lying within a given distance (the radius) of a given point; specifically, the homologue of the disk in a Euclidean space of any number of dimensions.
- The set of points in a topological space lying within some open set containing a given point; the analogue of the disk in a Euclidean space.
- A testicle.
- Nonsense.
"That’s a load of balls, and you know it! — Synonyms — See WikiSaurus:Nonsense" - Courage.
"I doubt he’s got the balls to tell him off." - A single delivery by the bowler, six of which make up an over.
- The ball of a foot
- A formal dance.
- A very enjoyable time.
"I had a ball at that concert"
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 →
ball used as a verb:
- To have sexual intercourse with.
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 →
ball used as an interjection:
- An appeal by the crowd for holding the ball against a tackled player. This is heard almost any time an opposition player is tackled, without regard to whether the rules about "prior opportunity" to dispose of the ball are fulfilled.
"2007: A good tackle (and some bad ones) will bring a cry of "Ball!" from the crowd – a plea for a holding the ball free kick. — AFL Sydney Swans Rules Zone [http://www.afl.com.au/FanZone/Rules/tabid/7892/Default.aspx]"
An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is ball?
- Noun usage: 'ball' of wool
- Noun usage: That’s a load of balls, and you know it! — Synonyms — See WikiSaurus:Nonsense
- Noun usage: I doubt he’s got the balls to tell him off.
- Noun usage: I had a ball at that concert
- Interjection usage: 2007: A good tackle (and some bad ones) will bring a cry of "Ball!" from the crowd – a plea for a holding the ball free kick. — AFL Sydney Swans Rules Zone [http://www.afl.com.au/FanZone/Rules/tabid/7892/Default.aspx]
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of ball 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 ball, 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).