Word Type
Hand can be a noun or a verb.
hand used as a noun:
- That part of the fore limb below the forearm or wrist in a human, and the corresponding part in many other animals; manus; paw. See manus.
- That which resembles, or to some extent performs the office of, a human hand; as,
"(a) A limb of certain animals, as the foot of a hawk, or any one of the four extremities of a monkey." - In long measure, two different lengths:
- A side; part, camp; direction, either right or left.
- Power of performance; means of execution; ability; skill; dexterity.
- Actual performance; deed; act; workmanship; agency; hence, manner of performance.
- An agent; a servant, or manual laborer, especially in compounds; a workman, trained or competent for special service or duty; a performer more or less skillful; as,
"an old hand at speaking." - An instance of helping.
"Bob gave Alice a hand to move the furniture." - Handwriting; style of penmanship; as,
"A good, bad or running hand. Hence, a signature." - Personal possession; ownership; hence, control; direction; management; — usually in the plural.
- That which is, or may be, held in a hand at once; as
"(a) : The set of cards held by a player." - Applause.
"Give him a hand." - Agency in transmission from one person to another; as,
"to buy at first hand, that is, from the producer, or when new; at second hand, that is, when no longer in the producer’s hand, or when not new." - The feel of a fabric; the impression or quality of the fabric as judged qualitatively by the sense of touch.
"This fabric has a smooth, soft hand." - Rate; price.
- Each of the pointers on the face of an analog clock, which are used to indicate the time of day.
- The small part of a gunstock near the lock, which is grasped by the hand in taking aim.
- The collective noun for a bunch of bananas.
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 →
hand used as a verb:
- To give, pass, or transmit with the hand; as
"he handed them the letter." - To lead, guide, or assist with the hand; to conduct
"to hand a lady into a carriage." - To manage; as, I hand my oar. — Matthew Prior
- To seize; to lay hands on. — Shakespeare
- To pledge by the hand; to handfast.
- To furl; — said of a sail. — Totten
- To cooperate. — Massinger
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 →
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What type of word is hand?
- Noun usage: (a) A limb of certain animals, as the foot of a hawk, or any one of the four extremities of a monkey.
- Noun usage: (b) An index or pointer on a dial; such as the hour or minute hand of a clock
- Noun usage: an old hand at speaking.
- Noun usage: Bob gave Alice a hand to move the furniture.
- Noun usage: A good, bad or running hand. Hence, a signature.
- Noun usage: (a) : The set of cards held by a player.
- Noun usage: (b) (Tobacco Manufacturing): A bundle of tobacco leaves tied together.
- Noun usage: Give him a hand.
- Noun usage: to buy at first hand, that is, from the producer, or when new; at second hand, that is, when no longer in the producer’s hand, or when not new.
- Noun usage: This fabric has a smooth, soft hand.
- Verb usage: he handed them the letter.
- Verb usage: to hand a lady into a carriage.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of hand 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 hand, 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).