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

key used as an adjective:

  1. Indispensable.
    "He is the key player for his soccer team."
  2. Important, salient.
    "She makes several key points"

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 →

key used as a verb:

  1. To fit (a lock) with a key.
  2. To fit (pieces of a mechanical assembly) with a key to maintain the orientation between them.
  3. (telegraphy and radio telegraphy) To depress (a telegraph key).
  4. (radio) To operate (the transmitter switch of a two-way radio).
  5. (more usually to key in) To enter (information) by typing on a keyboard or keypad.
    "Our instructor told us to key in our user IDs."
  6. To vandalize (a car, etc.) by scratching with an implement such as a key.
    "He keyed the car that had taken his parking spot."
  7. To link (as one might do with a key or legend).
    "He hadn't keyed smoking with lung cancer."
  8. To mark or indicate with a symbol indicating membership in a class.

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 →

key used as a noun:

  1. An object designed to open and close a lock.
  2. An object designed to fit between two other objects (such as a shaft and a wheel) in a mechanism and maintain the orientation between them.
  3. A crucial step or requirement.
    "the key to solving this problem..."
  4. A guide explaining the symbols or terminology of a map or chart; a legend.
    "The key says that A stands for the accounting department."
  5. One of several small, usually square buttons on a typewriter or computer keyboard, most of which generally correspond to a particular character.
    "Press the Escape key."
  6. One of a number of rectangular moving parts on a piano or musical keyboard, each causing a particular sound or note to be produced.
  7. One of various levers on a musical instrument used to select notes, such as a lever opening a hole on a woodwind.
  8. A hierarchical scale of musical notes on which a composition is based
    "the key of B-flat major"
  9. A device used to transmit Morse code.
  10. A piece of information (e.g. a passphrase) used to encode or decode a message or messages.
  11. In a relational database, a field used as an index into another table (not necessarily unique).
  12. A value that uniquely identifies an entry in an associative array.
  13. The free-throw lane together with the circle surrounding the free-throw line, the free-throw lane having formerly been narrower, giving the area the shape of a skeleton key hole.
    "He shoots from the top of the key."
  14. kilogram
  15. One of a string of small islands.
    ""the Florida Keys""

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 key?

As detailed above, 'key' can be an adjective, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: He is the key player for his soccer team.
  2. Adjective usage: He is the key witness.
  3. Adjective usage: She makes several key points
  4. Verb usage: Our instructor told us to key in our user IDs.
  5. Verb usage: He keyed the car that had taken his parking spot.
  6. Verb usage: He hadn't keyed smoking with lung cancer.
  7. Noun usage: the key to solving this problem...
  8. Noun usage: the key to winning this game
  9. Noun usage: The key says that A stands for the accounting department.
  10. Noun usage: Press the Escape key.
  11. Noun usage: the key of B-flat major
  12. Noun usage: He shoots from the top of the key.
  13. Noun usage: "the Florida Keys"

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