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Factor can be a verb or a noun.

factor used as a verb:

  1. To find all the factors of (a number or other mathematical object) (the objects that divide it evenly).
  2. To be a product of other objects.

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 →

factor used as a noun:

  1. A doer, maker; a person who does things for another person or organization
    "The factor of the trading post bought the furs."
  2. An integral part
    "The greatest factor in the decision was the need for public transportation."
  3. Any of various objects multiplied together to form some whole
    "3 is a factor of 12, as are 2, 4 and 6."
  4. Influence; a phenomenon that affects the nature, the magnitude, and/or the timing of a consequence
    "The launch temperature was a factor of the Challenger disaster."

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 factor?

As detailed above, 'factor' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: The factor of the trading post bought the furs.
  2. Noun usage: The greatest factor in the decision was the need for public transportation.
  3. Noun usage: The economy was a factor in this year's budget figures.
  4. Noun usage: 3 is a factor of 12, as are 2, 4 and 6.
  5. Noun usage: The factors of the Klein four-group are both cyclic of order 2.
  6. Noun usage: The launch temperature was a factor of the Challenger disaster.

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