Word Type
Cave can be a verb, a noun or an interjection.
cave used as a verb:
- To surrender.
"He caved under pressure." - To collapse.
"First the braces buckled, then the roof began to cave, then we ran." - To hollow out or undermine.
"The levee has been severely caved by the river current." - To engage in the recreational exploration of caves; to spelunk.
"I have caved from Yugoslavia to Kentucky." - In room-and-pillar mining, to extract a deposit of rock by breaking down a pillar which had been holding it in place.
"The deposit is caved by knocking out the posts." - To work over tailings to dress small pieces of marketable ore.
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 →
cave used as a noun:
- A large, naturally-occurring cavity formed underground, or in the face of a cliff or a hillside.
"We found a cave on the mountainside where we could take shelter." - A hole, depression, or gap in earth or rock, whether natural or man-made.
- A storage cellar, especially for wine or cheese.
"This wine has been aged in our cave for thirty years." - A place of retreat, such as a man cave.
"My room was a cozy cave where I could escape from my family." - A naturally-occurring cavity in bedrock which is large enough to be entered by an adult.
"It was not strictly a cave, but a narrow fissure in the rock." - A shielded area where nuclear experiments can be carried out.
- Debris, particularly broken rock, which falls into a drill hole and interferes with drilling.
- A collapse or cave-in.
- The vagina.
- A group that breaks from a larger political party or faction on a particular issue.
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 →
cave used as an interjection:
- look out!; beware!
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 cave?
- Verb usage: He caved under pressure.
- Verb usage: First the braces buckled, then the roof began to cave, then we ran.
- Verb usage: The levee has been severely caved by the river current.
- Verb usage: I have caved from Yugoslavia to Kentucky.
- Verb usage: Let's go caving this weekend.
- Verb usage: The deposit is caved by knocking out the posts.
- Noun usage: We found a cave on the mountainside where we could take shelter.
- Noun usage: This wine has been aged in our cave for thirty years.
- Noun usage: My room was a cozy cave where I could escape from my family.
- Noun usage: It was not strictly a cave, but a narrow fissure in the rock.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of cave 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 cave, 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).