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Bass can be an adjective or a noun.

bass used as an adjective:

  1. Of sound, a voice or an instrument, low in pitch or frequency.
    "The giant spoke in a deep, bass, rumbling voice that shook me to my boots."

Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →

bass used as a noun:

  1. A low spectrum of sound tones.
    "Peter adjusted the equalizer on his audio equipment to emphasize the bass."
  2. A section of musical group that produces low-pitched sound, lower than tenor.
    "The conductor preferred to situate the bass in the middle rear, rather than to one side of the orchestra."
  3. A male singer who sings in the bass range.
    "Halfway through middle school, Edgar morphed from a soprano to a bass, much to the amazement and amusement of his fellow choristers."
  4. An instrument that plays in the bass range, in particular a double bass, bass guitar, electric bass or bass synthesiser.
    "The musician swung the bass over his head like an axe and smashed it into the amplifier, creating a discordant howl of noise."
  5. The clef sign that indicates that the pitch of the notes is below middle C; a bass clef.
    "The score had been written without the treble and bass, but it was easy to pick out which was which based on the location of the notes on the staff."
  6. The perch; any of various marine and freshwater fish resembling the perch, all within the order of Perciformes.

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 bass?

As detailed above, 'bass' can be an adjective or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: The giant spoke in a deep, bass, rumbling voice that shook me to my boots.
  2. Noun usage: Peter adjusted the equalizer on his audio equipment to emphasize the bass.
  3. Noun usage: The conductor preferred to situate the bass in the middle rear, rather than to one side of the orchestra.
  4. Noun usage: Halfway through middle school, Edgar morphed from a soprano to a bass, much to the amazement and amusement of his fellow choristers.
  5. Noun usage: The musician swung the bass over his head like an axe and smashed it into the amplifier, creating a discordant howl of noise.
  6. Noun usage: The score had been written without the treble and bass, but it was easy to pick out which was which based on the location of the notes on the staff.

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