Word Type
Boy can be an interjection or a noun.
boy used as an interjection:
- Exclamation of surprise, pleasure or longing.
""Boy, that was close!""
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 →
boy used as a noun:
- A young male human.
"The boys were playing kickball in the mud." - A man of any age, used as a friendly diminutive, or of a man who is merely younger than the speaker.
"Whatever else you say about him, the boy can play." - A male servant.
"When the 'dipenda' (independence movement) in Belgian Congo turned violent, the white colonisators' often materially privileged black domestic boys were mistrusted and often abused as collaborators." - A non-white slave or labourer; a male African-American of any age.
- A lower-class or disreputable man; a worthless person.
- An adult male, particularly when used by straight women or gay men to refer to someone considered attractive.
- Male (usually adult) friend; mainly used in the plural: boys.
"I’m going out for a few drinks with the boys." - A proud parent's son, regardless of age.
"That's my boy." - A caring owner's pet or working animal, regardless of age.
"Here, boys, heel; yes, Bobby, show the puppies how, good boy!"
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is boy?
- Interjection usage: "Boy, that was close!"
- Interjection usage: "Boy, that tastes good!"
- Interjection usage: "Boy, I wish I could go to Canada!"
- Noun usage: The boys were playing kickball in the mud.
- Noun usage: Steve is a boy of 16.
- Noun usage: Whatever else you say about him, the boy can play.
- Noun usage: 1977: I like the boy. — Australian entertainer Bert Newton, to Mohammed Ali at the 1977 Logie Awards, famously unaware of how insulting this is under the US usage below [http://www.abc.net.au/thingo/txt/s1088100.htm]
- Noun usage: When the 'dipenda' (independence movement) in Belgian Congo turned violent, the white colonisators' often materially privileged black domestic boys were mistrusted and often abused as collaborators.
- Noun usage: I’m going out for a few drinks with the boys.
- Noun usage: Me and my boy grew up together in Southside.
- Noun usage: That's my boy.
- Noun usage: Here, boys, heel; yes, Bobby, show the puppies how, good boy!
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of boy 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 boy, 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).