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Colour can be a noun or a verb.

colour used as a noun:

  1. The spectral composition of visible light
    "Humans and birds can perceive colour"
  2. A particular set of visible spectral compositions, perceived or named as a class
    "Most languages have names for the colours black, white, red and green."
  3. Hue as opposed to achromatic colours (black, white and greys).
    "He referred to the white flag as one "drained of all colour"."
  4. Human skin tone, especially as an indicator of race or ethnicity.
    "Colour has been a sensitive issue in many societies."
  5. Interest, especially in a selective area
    "a bit of local colour"
  6. Any of the standard dark tinctures used in a coat of arms, including azure, gules, sable, and vert. Contrast with metal.
  7. A standard or banner.
    "The loss of their colours destroyed the regiment's morale."
  8. The system of colour television.
    "This film is broadcast in colour."
  9. An award for sporting achievement, particularly within a school or university.
    "He was awarded colours for his football."
  10. A property of quarks, with three values called red, green, and blue, which they can exchange by passing gluons.
  11. The relative lightness or darkness of a mass of written or printed text on a page.
  12. Any of the coloured balls excluding the reds.

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 →

colour used as a verb:

  1. To give something colour.
    "We could colour the walls red."
  2. To apply colours to the areas within the boundaries of a line drawing using coloured markers or crayons.
    "My son loves to colour."
  3. Of a face: To become red through increased blood flow, implying due to strong emotion.
    "Her face coloured as she realised her mistake."
  4. To affect without completely changing.
    "That interpretation certainly colours my perception of the book."
  5. To attribute a quality to.
    "Colour me confused."

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 colour?

As detailed above, 'colour' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Humans and birds can perceive colour
  2. Noun usage: Most languages have names for the colours black, white, red and green.
  3. Noun usage: He referred to the white flag as one "drained of all colour".
  4. Noun usage: Colour has been a sensitive issue in many societies.
  5. Noun usage: a bit of local colour
  6. Noun usage: The loss of their colours destroyed the regiment's morale.
  7. Noun usage: This film is broadcast in colour.
  8. Noun usage: He was awarded colours for his football.
  9. Verb usage: We could colour the walls red.
  10. Verb usage: My son loves to colour.
  11. Verb usage: Her face coloured as she realised her mistake.
  12. Verb usage: That interpretation certainly colours my perception of the book.
  13. Verb usage: Colour me confused.

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