Word Type
Coal can be a verb or a noun.
coal used as a verb:
- To take in coal; as, the steamer coaled at Southampton.
- To be converted to charcoal.
"1957: As a result, particles of wood and twigs insufficiently coaled are frequently found at the bottom of such pits. — H.R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, p. 18."
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 →
coal used as a noun:
- A black rock formed from prehistoric plant remains, composed largely of carbon and burned as a fuel.
- A piece of coal used for burning. Note that in British English the first of the following examples would usually be used, whereas in American English the latter would.
"Put some coals on the fire." - A type of coal, such as bituminous, anthracite, or lignite, and grades and varieties thereof.
- A smouldering piece of material.
"Just as the camp-fire died down to just coals, with no flames to burn the marshmallows, someone dumped a whole load of wood on, so I gave up and went to bed."
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 coal?
- Verb usage: 1957: As a result, particles of wood and twigs insufficiently coaled are frequently found at the bottom of such pits. — H.R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, p. 18.
- Noun usage: Put some coals on the fire.
- Noun usage: Put some coal on the fire.
- Noun usage: Just as the camp-fire died down to just coals, with no flames to burn the marshmallows, someone dumped a whole load of wood on, so I gave up and went to bed.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of coal 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 coal, 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).