Word Type
Dead can be a noun, an adjective, an adverb or a verb.
dead used as a noun:
- Time when coldness, darkness, or stillness is most intense.
"The dead of night. The dead of winter." - Those who have died.
"Have respect for the dead."
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 →
dead used as an adjective:
- No longer living.
"All of my grandparents are dead." - Figuratively, not alive; lacking life
- be dead to (person) : So hated by that they are absolutely ignored.
"He is dead to me." - Without emotion.
"She stood with dead face and limp arms, unresponsive to my plea." - Stationary; static.
"the dead load on the floor; a dead lift." - Without interest to one of the senses; dull; flat.
"dead air; a dead glass of soda." - Unproductive.
"dead time; dead fields; also in compounds." - Completely inactive; without power; without a signal.
"OK, the circuit’s dead. Go ahead and cut the wire." - Broken or inoperable.
"That monitor is dead; don’t bother hooking it up." - No longer used or required.
"There are several dead laws still on the books regulating where horses may be hitched." - Not in play.
"Once the ball crosses the foul line, it’s dead." - Full and complete.
"dead stop; dead sleep; dead giveaway; dead silence" - Exact.
"dead center; dead aim; a dead eye; a dead level" - Experiencing pins and needles (paresthesia).
"After sitting on my hands for a while, my arms became dead."
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 →
dead used as an adverb:
- Exactly right.
"He hit the target dead in the centre." - Very, absolutely, extremely, suddenly.
"She’s dead sexy."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
dead used as a verb:
- to prevent by disabling; stop
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is dead?
- Noun usage: The dead of night. The dead of winter.
- Noun usage: Have respect for the dead.
- Adjective usage: All of my grandparents are dead.
- Adjective usage: He is dead to me.
- Adjective usage: She stood with dead face and limp arms, unresponsive to my plea.
- Adjective usage: the dead load on the floor; a dead lift.
- Adjective usage: dead air; a dead glass of soda.
- Adjective usage: dead time; dead fields; also in compounds.
- Adjective usage: OK, the circuit’s dead. Go ahead and cut the wire.
- Adjective usage: Now that the motor’s dead you can reach in and extract the spark plugs.
- Adjective usage: That monitor is dead; don’t bother hooking it up.
- Adjective usage: There are several dead laws still on the books regulating where horses may be hitched.
- Adjective usage: Is this beer glass dead ?
- Adjective usage: Once the ball crosses the foul line, it’s dead.
- Adjective usage: dead stop; dead sleep; dead giveaway; dead silence
- Adjective usage: dead center; dead aim; a dead eye; a dead level
- Adjective usage: After sitting on my hands for a while, my arms became dead.
- Adverb usage: He hit the target dead in the centre.
- Adverb usage: She’s dead sexy.
- Adverb usage: He’s dead stupid.
- Adverb usage: I’m dead tired.
- Adverb usage: That’s dead sure!
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of dead 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 dead, 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).