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Jam can be a noun or a verb.

jam used as a noun:

  1. A sweet mixture of fruit boiled with sugar and allowed to congeal. Often spread on bread or toast or used in jam tarts.
  2. A difficult situation.
    "I’m in a jam right now. Can you help me out?"
  3. Blockage, congestion.
    "A traffic jam caused us to miss the game's first period."
  4. An informal, impromptu performance or rehearsal.
  5. A difficult situation for a pitcher or defending team.
    "He's in a jam now, having walked the bases loaded with the cleanup hitter coming to bat."
  6. A forceful dunk.
  7. (roller derby) A play during which points can be scored.
    "Toughie scored four points in that jam."
  8. Any of several rock-climbing maneuvers requiring wedging of an extremity into a tight space.
    "I used a whole series of fist and foot jams in that crack."
  9. luck.
    "He's got more jam than Waitrose."

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 →

jam used as a verb:

  1. To block or confuse a broadcast signal.
  2. To throw a pitch at or near the batter's hands.
    "Jones was jammed by the pitch."
  3. To play music (especially improvisation as a group.)
  4. To get something stuck in a confined space.
    "My foot GOT jammed in a gap between the rocks."
  5. To injure a finger or toe by sudden compression of the digit's tip.
    "When he tripped on the step he jammed his toe."
  6. To squeeze into a small space.
    "The rush-hour train was jammed with commuters."
  7. To brusquely force something into a space; cram.
    "They temporarily stopped the gas tank leak by jamming a piece of taffy into the hole."
  8. Causing congestion or blockage. Often used with "up"
    "A single accident can jam the roads for hours."
  9. (roller derby) To attempt to score points.
    "Toughie jammed four times in the second period."

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 jam?

As detailed above, 'jam' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: I’m in a jam right now. Can you help me out?
  2. Noun usage: A traffic jam caused us to miss the game's first period.
  3. Noun usage: He's in a jam now, having walked the bases loaded with the cleanup hitter coming to bat.
  4. Noun usage: Toughie scored four points in that jam.
  5. Noun usage: I used a whole series of fist and foot jams in that crack.
  6. Noun usage: He's got more jam than Waitrose.
  7. Verb usage: Jones was jammed by the pitch.
  8. Verb usage: My foot GOT jammed in a gap between the rocks.
  9. Verb usage: When he tripped on the step he jammed his toe.
  10. Verb usage: The rush-hour train was jammed with commuters.
  11. Verb usage: They temporarily stopped the gas tank leak by jamming a piece of taffy into the hole.
  12. Verb usage: A single accident can jam the roads for hours.
  13. Verb usage: Toughie jammed four times in the second period.

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