Word Type
Killer can be an adjective or a noun.
killer used as an adjective:
- Excellent, very good.
"Those are some killer chicken wings, where did you get them?"
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 →
killer used as a noun:
- That which kills.
"There’s a killer on the loose." - That which causes stress or is extremely difficult, especially that which may cause failure at a task.
"That test was a killer." - Something that is so far ahead of its competition that it effectively kills off that competition.
"Various means had were used to steer aircraft in the early years but ailerons were the killer." - A diacritic mark used in Indic scripts to suppress an inherent vowel (e.g., the Hindi viram, the Bengali or Oriya hasanta) or render the entire syllable silent (e.g., the Burmese virama, the Khmer toandakhiat).
"So, for example, an invisible ǎthaq “killer” (virama) (U+1039) is not inserted between initial and medial consonants. — http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/burmese/SOASMyanmar_keyboard_and_font_user_manual.pdf"
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 killer?
- Adjective usage: Those are some killer chicken wings, where did you get them?
- Noun usage: There’s a killer on the loose.
- Noun usage: My cat is a habitual bird killer.
- Noun usage: Carbon monoxide is a silent killer.
- Noun usage: That test was a killer.
- Noun usage: The final hill in the race course was a killer.
- Noun usage: Various means had were used to steer aircraft in the early years but ailerons were the killer.
- Noun usage: So, for example, an invisible ǎthaq “killer” (virama) (U+1039) is not inserted between initial and medial consonants. — http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/burmese/SOASMyanmar_keyboard_and_font_user_manual.pdf
- Noun usage: We have previously shown that there is no “virama” sign as a general “killer” in Khmer script, unlike, for example, in Devanagari script. — http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2458.pdf
- Noun usage: The virama U+1039 MYANMAR SIGN VIRAMA also participates in some common constructions where it appears as a visible sign, commonly termed killer. — http://www.myanmarnlp.net.mm/doc/20010714_implementation_draungmaw1.PPT
- Noun usage: In the course of its adaptation to non-Indo-Aryan languages, the Burmese script has acquired some features that distinguish it from other Indic scripts. The killer, or virama, participates in some common constructions that would be clumsy to handle the way they would be in the other Indic scripts, so the control function of the virama is separated from the diacritic function of the killer. The virama, 0F4D is used to form conjunct consonants, while the killer, 0F52, is a simple diacritic and has no effect on character shaping. The killer is also combined with the VOWEL SIGN O (0F4B) to form the low level tone vowel “o.” When used this way, this symbol is known as hyei hto, or “thrust forward.” — http://unicode.org/reports/tr1.html
- Noun usage: For example, although the ‘vowel killer’ diacritic may be called a ‘pulli’ in Tamil, it is still referred to by the Unicode character names as a ‘virama’. — http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/09-ri-indic/indic-paper.html
- Noun usage: Thai words that have been borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali and English usually try to retain as much of the original spelling as possible; as this will often produce pronunciations that are impossible or misleading, a ‘killer’ symbol is placed above the redundant consonant to indicate that it may be ignored — Thai: An Essential Grammar By David Smyth
- Noun usage: Sometimes the ‘killer’ sign, called kaaran in Thai, cancels out not only the consonant above which it appears, but also the one immediately preceding it. — Thai: An Essential Grammar By David Smyth
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of killer 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 killer, 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).