WordType Logo

Word Type

Drive can be a noun or a verb.

drive used as a noun:

  1. Self-motivation; ability coupled with ambition.
    "Crassus had wealth and wit, but Pompey had drive and Caesar as much again."
  2. A sustained advance in the face of the enemy to take a strategic objective.
    "Napoleon's drive on Moscow was as determined as it was disastrous."
  3. A motor that does not take fuel, but instead depends on a mechanism that stores potential energy for subsequent use.
    "Some old model trains have clockwork drives."
  4. A trip made in a motor vehicle.
    "It was a long drive."
  5. A driveway.
    "The mansion had a long, tree-lined drive."
  6. A type of public roadway.
    "Beverly Hills’ most famous street is Rodeo Drive."
  7. Desire or interest.
  8. An apparatus for reading and writing data to or from a mass storage device such as a disk, as a floppy drive.
  9. A mass storage device in which the mechanism for reading and writing data is integrated with the mechanism for storing data, as a hard drive, a flash drive.
  10. A stroke made with a driver.
  11. A ball struck in a flat trajectory.
  12. A type of shot played by swinging the bat in a vertical arc, through the line of the ball, and hitting it along the ground, normally between cover and midwicket.

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 →

drive used as a verb:

  1. To herd (animals) in a particular direction.
  2. To direct a vehicle powered by a horse, ox or similar animal.
  3. To cause animals to flee out of.
    "The beaters drove the brambles, causing a great rush of rabbits and other creatures."
  4. To move (something) by hitting it with great force.
    "You drive nails into wood with a hammer."
  5. To cause (a mechanism) to operate.
    "The pistons drive the crankshaft."
  6. To operate (a wheeled motorized vehicle).
  7. To motivate; to provide an incentive for.
    "What drives a person to run a marathon?"
  8. To compel (to do something).
    "Their debts finally drove them to sell the business."
  9. To cause to become.
    "This constant complaining is going to drive me to insanity."
  10. To hit the ball with a drive.
  11. To travel by operating a wheeled motorized vehicle.
    "I drive to work every day."
  12. To convey (a person, etc) in a wheeled motorized vehicle.
    "My wife drove me to the airport."

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 drive?

As detailed above, 'drive' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Crassus had wealth and wit, but Pompey had drive and Caesar as much again.
  2. Noun usage: Napoleon's drive on Moscow was as determined as it was disastrous.
  3. Noun usage: Some old model trains have clockwork drives.
  4. Noun usage: It was a long drive.
  5. Noun usage: The mansion had a long, tree-lined drive.
  6. Noun usage: Beverly Hills’ most famous street is Rodeo Drive.
  7. Verb usage: The beaters drove the brambles, causing a great rush of rabbits and other creatures.
  8. Verb usage: You drive nails into wood with a hammer.
  9. Verb usage: The pistons drive the crankshaft.
  10. Verb usage: What drives a person to run a marathon?
  11. Verb usage: Their debts finally drove them to sell the business.
  12. Verb usage: This constant complaining is going to drive me to insanity.
  13. Verb usage: You are driving me crazy!
  14. Verb usage: I drive to work every day.
  15. Verb usage: My wife drove me to the airport.

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

Recent Queries