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Dog can be a noun or a verb.

dog used as a noun:

  1. An animal, member of the genus Canis (probably descended from the common wolf) that has been domesticated for thousands of years; occurs in many breeds. Scientific name: Canis lupus familiaris.
    "The dog barked all night long."
  2. A male dog, as opposed to a bitch (a female dog.)
  3. A dull, unattractive girl or woman.
    "She’s a real dog."
  4. A man.
    "You lucky dog!"
  5. A coward
    "Come back and fight you dogs!"
  6. Someone who is morally reprehensible.
    "You dirty dog."
  7. Any of various mechanical devices for holding, gripping, or fastening something, particularly with a tooth-like projection.
  8. "A click or pallet adapted to engage the teeth of a ratchet-wheel, to restrain the back action; a click or pawl." (See also: ratchet, windlass)
    "1897 Universal Dictionary of the English Language, Robert Hunter and Charles Morris, eds., v2 p1700."
  9. A metal support for logs in a fireplace.
    "The dogs were too hot to touch."
  10. A hot dog.
  11. Underdog
  12. A foot
    ""My dogs are barking!" meaning "My feet hurt!""

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 →

dog used as a verb:

  1. To go after with the intent to catch.
  2. To follow in an annoying way, to constantly be affected by.
    "The woman cursed him so that trouble would dog his every step."
  3. To fasten a hatch securely.
    "It is very important to dog down these hatches..."
  4. To watch, or participate, in sexual activity in a public place, on the pretence of walking the dog; see also dogging.
    "I admit that I like to dog at my local country park."
  5. To intentionally restrict labor productivity; to work at the slowest rate that goes unpunished. (Often takes it as object.) Has also been called soldiering or goldbricking.
    "A surprise inspection of the night shift found that some workers were dogging it."
  6. (up) to position oneself on all fours, after the manner of a dog - probably related to doggy style.
    "I'd ask why you're dogged up in the middle of the room, but I probably don't want to know..."

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 dog?

As detailed above, 'dog' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: The dog barked all night long.
  2. Noun usage: She’s a real dog.
  3. Noun usage: You lucky dog!
  4. Noun usage: Come back and fight you dogs!
  5. Noun usage: You dirty dog.
  6. Noun usage: 1897 Universal Dictionary of the English Language, Robert Hunter and Charles Morris, eds., v2 p1700.
  7. Noun usage: The dogs were too hot to touch.
  8. Noun usage: "My dogs are barking!" meaning "My feet hurt!"
  9. Verb usage: The woman cursed him so that trouble would dog his every step.
  10. Verb usage: It is very important to dog down these hatches...
  11. Verb usage: I admit that I like to dog at my local country park.
  12. Verb usage: A surprise inspection of the night shift found that some workers were dogging it.
  13. Verb usage: I'd ask why you're dogged up in the middle of the room, but I probably don't want to know...

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