Word Type
Gun can be a verb, an adjective or a noun.
gun used as a verb:
- To shoot someone or something, usually with a firearm.
"He gunned down the hitmen." - To speed something up.
"He gunned the engine up." - To offer vigorous support to a person or cause.
"He’s gunning for you." - To seek to attack someone; to take aim at someone.
"He's been gunning for you ever since you embarrassed him at the party."
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 →
gun used as an adjective:
- To be very good or the best at something.[http://www.aussieslang.com/slang/australian-slang-g.asp?page=2]
"Daniel is gun at basketball."
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 →
gun used as a noun:
- A cannon with relatively long barrel, operating with relatively low angle of fire, and having a high muzzle velocity. JP 1-02.
- A cannon with a 6-inch/155mm minimum nominal bore diameter and tube length 30 calibers or more. See also: howitzer; mortar. JP 1-02.
- A very portable, short weapon, for hand use; a bullet or projectile-firing weapon; a handgun: a revolver, pistol, Derringer, zipgun, so forth.
- A less portable, long weapon; a bullet or projectile firing weapon; a rifle, either manual, automatic or semi-automatic; a musket or shotgun.
"This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for fighting, one is for fun. (U.S. military cadence, used to make recruits memorize that the only correct term for a soldier's standard-issue firearm is a rifle, not a gun.)" - Any weapon that launches a projectile from a tube, even if it is not a firearm, e.g., air-pressure pellet gun, air rifle, BB gun; or, a home-made firearm such as a potato gun.
- Any device or tool that projects a substance in a superficially similar fashion to a firearm, e.g., nail gun, squirt gun, spray gun, grease gun.
- A device or tool shaped like a pistol and operated in similar fashion by pulling a trigger with the index finger, e.g., rivet gun, screw gun, price-label gun.
- A long surfboard designed for surfing big waves (not the same as a longboard, a gun has a pointed nose and is generally a little narrower).
"2000: by the winter of 1962, the Brewer Surfboards Hawaii gun was the most in-demand big-wave equipment on the North Shore. — Drew Kampion at surfline.com [http://www.surfline.com/surfaz/surfaz.cfm?id=766]" - A pattern that "fires" out other patterns.
- Biceps.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is gun?
- Verb usage: He gunned down the hitmen.
- Verb usage: The CEO gunned down that idea before we could present it to the board.
- Verb usage: He gunned the engine up.
- Verb usage: He’s gunning for you.
- Verb usage: He's been gunning for you ever since you embarrassed him at the party.
- Adjective usage: Daniel is gun at basketball.
- Noun usage: This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for fighting, one is for fun. (U.S. military cadence, used to make recruits memorize that the only correct term for a soldier's standard-issue firearm is a rifle, not a gun.)
- Noun usage: 2000: by the winter of 1962, the Brewer Surfboards Hawaii gun was the most in-demand big-wave equipment on the North Shore. — Drew Kampion at surfline.com [http://www.surfline.com/surfaz/surfaz.cfm?id=766]
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of gun 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 gun, 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).