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Dummy can be a verb or a noun.

dummy used as a verb:

  1. To make a mock-up or prototype version of something, without some or all off its intended functionality.
    "The carpenters dummied some props for the rehearsals."

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 →

dummy used as a noun:

  1. A silent person; a person who does not talk.
  2. An unintelligent person.
    "Don't be such a dummy!"
  3. A figure of a person or animal used by a ventriloquist; a puppet.
  4. Something constructed with the size and form of a human, to be used in place of a person.
    "To understand the effects of the accident, we dropped a dummy from the rooftop."
  5. A deliberately nonfunctional device or tool used in place of a functional one.
    "The hammer and drill in the display are dummies."
  6. A pacifier.
    "The baby wants her dummy."
  7. The partner of the winning bidder, who shows his or her hand.
  8. A bodily gesture meant to fool an opposing player in sport; feint.
  9. A word serving only to make a construction grammatical.
    "The pronoun "it" in "It's a mystery why this happened" is a dummy."
  10. An unused parameter or value.
    "If flag1 is false, the other parameters are dummies."

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 dummy?

As detailed above, 'dummy' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: The carpenters dummied some props for the rehearsals.
  2. Noun usage: Don't be such a dummy!
  3. Noun usage: To understand the effects of the accident, we dropped a dummy from the rooftop.
  4. Noun usage: The hammer and drill in the display are dummies.
  5. Noun usage: The baby wants her dummy.
  6. Noun usage: The pronoun "it" in "It's a mystery why this happened" is a dummy.
  7. Noun usage: If flag1 is false, the other parameters are dummies.

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