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Counter can be an adverb, an adjective, a verb or a noun.

counter used as an adverb:

  1. Contrary, in opposition; in an opposite direction.
    ""Running counter to all the rules of virtue." -Locks."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

counter used as an adjective:

  1. Contrary; opposite; contrasted; opposed; adverse; antagonistic.
    "His carrying a knife was counter to my plan."

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 →

counter used as a verb:

  1. To contradict, oppose.
  2. To return a blow while receiving one, as in boxing.
  3. To take action in response to; to respond.

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 →

counter used as a noun:

  1. An object (now especially a small disc) used in counting or keeping count, or as a marker in games, etc.
    "He rolled a six on the dice, so moved his counter forward six spaces."
  2. Any stone lying closer to the center than any of the opponent's stones.
  3. A table or board on which money is counted and over which business is transacted; a shop tabletop on which goods are examined, weighed or measured.
    "He put his money on the counter, and the shopkeeper put it in the till."
  4. One who counts, or reckons up; a reckoner.
    "He's only 16 months, but is already a good counter - he can count to 100."
  5. A telltale; a contrivance attached to an engine, printing press, or other machine, for the purpose of counting the revolutions or the pulsations.
  6. The prison attached to a city court; a Counter.
  7. a class of word used along with numbers to count objects and events, typically mass nouns. Although rare and optional in English (e.g. "20 head of cattle"), they are numerous and required in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
  8. In a kitchen, a surface, often built into the wall and above a cabinet, whereon various food preparations take place.
  9. A proactive defensive hold or move in reaction to a hold or move by one's opponent.
    "Always know a counter to any hold you try against your opponent."
  10. Something in contradiction or opposition to a proposal, suggestion, policy, etc.
    "We believe that his proposal is counter to our well-established policy."
  11. A variable, memory location, etc. whose contents are incremented to keep a count.
  12. A hit counter.
  13. The piece of a shoe or a boot around the heel of the foot (above the heel of the shoe/boot).
  14. The overhanging stern of a vessel above the waterline.

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 →

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What type of word is counter?

As detailed above, 'counter' can be an adverb, an adjective, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: "Running counter to all the rules of virtue." -Locks.
  2. Adjective usage: His carrying a knife was counter to my plan.
  3. Noun usage: He rolled a six on the dice, so moved his counter forward six spaces.
  4. Noun usage: He put his money on the counter, and the shopkeeper put it in the till.
  5. Noun usage: He's only 16 months, but is already a good counter - he can count to 100.
  6. Noun usage: Always know a counter to any hold you try against your opponent.
  7. Noun usage: We believe that his proposal is counter to our well-established policy.

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