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Forage can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.

forage used as an adjective:

  1. Of or pertaining to forage or foraging.

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 →

forage used as a verb:

  1. To search for and gather food for animals, particularly cattle and horses.
    "1841 The message said that the party intended to hunt and forage through this region, for a month or two, afore it went back into the Canadas — James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=766700022&tag=069&query=forage&id=eaf069v1 Chapter 8.]"
  2. To rampage through, gathering and destroying as one goes.
    "1599 And your great-uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,"
  3. To rummage.
    "1898 Using the blankets for a basket, we sent up the books, instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed. — Robert Louis Stevenson, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=596645883&tag=Stevenson,+Robert+Louis,+1850-1894:+The+Wrecker,+1898&query=forage&id=SteWrec The Wrecker.]"

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 →

forage used as a noun:

  1. Fodder for animals, especially cattle and horses.
    "1819 The hermit was apparently somewhat moved to compassion by the anxiety as well as address which the stranger displayed in tending his horse; for, muttering something about provender left for the keeper's palfrey, he dragged out of a recess a bundle of forage, which he spread before the knight's charger. — Walter Scott, Ivanhoe [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=555890591&tag=Scott,+Walter:+Ivanhoe.+A+Romance,+1819&query=forage&id=ScoIvan here]"
  2. An act or instance of foraging.

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 forage?

As detailed above, 'forage' can be an adjective, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: 1841 The message said that the party intended to hunt and forage through this region, for a month or two, afore it went back into the Canadas — James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=766700022&tag=069&query=forage&id=eaf069v1 Chapter 8.]
  2. Verb usage: 1599 And your great-uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,
  3. Verb usage: Who on the French ground play'd a tragedy,
  4. Verb usage: Making defeat on the full power of France,
  5. Verb usage: Whiles his most mighty father on a hill
  6. Verb usage: Stood smiling to behold his lion's whelp
  7. Verb usage: Forage in blood of French nobility. — Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1, Scene 2.
  8. Verb usage: 1898 Using the blankets for a basket, we sent up the books, instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed. — Robert Louis Stevenson, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=596645883&tag=Stevenson,+Robert+Louis,+1850-1894:+The+Wrecker,+1898&query=forage&id=SteWrec The Wrecker.]
  9. Noun usage: 1819 The hermit was apparently somewhat moved to compassion by the anxiety as well as address which the stranger displayed in tending his horse; for, muttering something about provender left for the keeper's palfrey, he dragged out of a recess a bundle of forage, which he spread before the knight's charger. — Walter Scott, Ivanhoe [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=555890591&tag=Scott,+Walter:+Ivanhoe.+A+Romance,+1819&query=forage&id=ScoIvan here]

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