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Chew can be a noun or a verb.

chew used as a noun:

  1. A small sweet, such as a taffy, that is eaten by chewing.
    "Phillip purchased a bag of licorice chews at the drugstore."
  2. Chewing tobacco.
    "The school had banned chew and smokes from the school grounds, even for adults."
  3. A plug or wad of chewing tobacco; chaw or a chaw.
    "The ballplayers sat on the bench watching the rain, glumly working their chews."

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 →

chew used as a verb:

  1. To crush with the teeth by repeated closing and opening of the jaws; done to food to soften it and break it down by the action of saliva before it is swallowed.
    "Make sure to chew thoroughly, and don't talk with your mouth full!"
  2. To grind, tear, or otherwise degrade or demolish something with teeth or as with teeth.
    "He keep his feed in steel drums to prevent the mice from chewing holes in the feed-sacks."
  3. To think about something; to ponder; to chew over.
    "The professor stood at the blackboard, chalk in hand, and chewed the question the student had asked."

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 chew?

As detailed above, 'chew' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Phillip purchased a bag of licorice chews at the drugstore.
  2. Noun usage: The school had banned chew and smokes from the school grounds, even for adults.
  3. Noun usage: The ballplayers sat on the bench watching the rain, glumly working their chews.
  4. Noun usage: The first time he chewed tobacco, he swallowed his chew and got extremely sick.
  5. Verb usage: Make sure to chew thoroughly, and don't talk with your mouth full!
  6. Verb usage: The steak was tough to chew as it had been cooked too long.
  7. Verb usage: He keep his feed in steel drums to prevent the mice from chewing holes in the feed-sacks.
  8. Verb usage: The harsh desert wind and sand had chewed the stump into ragged strips of wood.
  9. Verb usage: The professor stood at the blackboard, chalk in hand, and chewed the question the student had asked.

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