WordType Logo

Word Type

Kill can be a noun or a verb.

kill used as a noun:

  1. The act of killing.
    "The assassin liked to make a clean kill, and thus favored small arms over explosives."
  2. Specifically, the death blow.
    "The hunter delivered the kill with a pistol shot to the head."
  3. The result of killing; that which has been killed.
    "The fox dragged its kill back to its den."
  4. A creek; a body of water.

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 →

kill used as a verb:

  1. To put to death; to extinguish the life of.
    "Smoking kills more people each year than alcohol and drugs combined."
  2. To render inoperative.
    "He killed the engine and turned off the headlights, but remained in the car, waiting."
  3. To stop, cease, or render void.
    "The editor decided to kill the story."
  4. To amaze, exceed, stun, or otherwise incapacitate.
    "That night, she was dressed to kill."
  5. To tell off severely.
    "My boss will kill me if I'm late."
  6. To use up or to waste.
    "I'm just doing this to kill time."
  7. To overpower or overwhelm.
    "The team had absolutely killed their traditional rivals, and the local sports bars were raucous with celebrations."
  8. To force a company out of business.
  9. To produce intense pain.
    "You don't ever want to get rabies. The doctor will have to give you multiple shots and they really kill."

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 →

Related Searches

What type of word is kill?

As detailed above, 'kill' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: The assassin liked to make a clean kill, and thus favored small arms over explosives.
  2. Noun usage: The hunter delivered the kill with a pistol shot to the head.
  3. Noun usage: The fox dragged its kill back to its den.
  4. Verb usage: Smoking kills more people each year than alcohol and drugs combined.
  5. Verb usage: There is conclusive evidence that smoking kills.
  6. Verb usage: He killed the engine and turned off the headlights, but remained in the car, waiting.
  7. Verb usage: The editor decided to kill the story.
  8. Verb usage: The news that a hurricane had destroyed our beach house killed our plans to sell it.
  9. Verb usage: That night, she was dressed to kill.
  10. Verb usage: That joke always kills me.
  11. Verb usage: It kills me to throw out three whole turkeys but I can't get anyone to take them and they've already started to go bad.
  12. Verb usage: My boss will kill me if I'm late.
  13. Verb usage: When she finally got home her dad just about killed her.
  14. Verb usage: I'm just doing this to kill time.
  15. Verb usage: Between the two of us, we killed the rest of the case of beer.
  16. Verb usage: The team had absolutely killed their traditional rivals, and the local sports bars were raucous with celebrations.
  17. Verb usage: You don't ever want to get rabies. The doctor will have to give you multiple shots and they really kill.

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

Recent Queries