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Cat can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.

cat used as a noun:

  1. A domesticated species of feline animal, commonly kept as a house pet.
  2. Any similar animal of the family Felidae, which includes lions, tigers, etc.
  3. A catfish.
  4. A spiteful or angry woman.
  5. An enthusiast or player of jazz.
  6. A strong tackle used to hoist an anchor to the cathead of a ship.
  7. Contraction of cat-o'-nine-tails.
    "No room to swing a cat."
  8. A person (usually male); dude (in its non-derogatory senses), guy, fella.
  9. A generic term for an earth moving machine, derived from caterpillar and more recently from bobcat.
  10. A sturdy merchant sailing vessel .
  11. The game of "trap and ball" (also called "cat and dog").
  12. The trap of the game of "trap and ball".
  13. Prostitute.
  14. A catamaran.
  15. A ‘catenate’ program and command in Unix that reads one or more files and directs their content to an output device.

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 →

cat used as an adjective:

  1. terrible, disastrous.
    "The weather was cat, so they returned home early."

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 →

cat used as a verb:

  1. To hoist (the anchor) by its ring so that it hangs at the cathead.
  2. To flog with a cat-o'-nine-tails.
  3. To vomit something.
  4. To apply the cat command to (a file).
  5. To dump large amounts of data on (an unprepared target) usually with no intention of browsing it carefully.

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 cat?

As detailed above, 'cat' can be a noun, an adjective or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: No room to swing a cat.
  2. Adjective usage: The weather was cat, so they returned home early.

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