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Knock can be a noun or a verb.

knock used as a noun:

  1. An abrupt rapping sound, as from an impact of a hard object against wood
    "I heard a knock on my door."
  2. An impact.
    "He took a knock on the head."
  3. a batsman's innings.
    "He played a slow but sure knock of 35."
  4. A type of abnormal combustion occuring in spark ignition engines. Normally a flame front advances progressively out from the spark, but when knock occurs unburnt air/fuel ahead of the flame self-ignites under the heat and pressure, producing a characteristic knocking sound and a sudden further increase in pressure which can be very damaging to the engine.

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 →

knock used as a verb:

  1. To rap one's knuckles against something, especially wood.
    "Knock on the door and find out if they're home."
  2. To bump or impact.
    "I knocked against the table and bruised my leg."
  3. To denigrate, undervalue.
    "Don't knock it until you've tried it."

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 knock?

As detailed above, 'knock' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: I heard a knock on my door.
  2. Noun usage: He took a knock on the head.
  3. Noun usage: He played a slow but sure knock of 35.
  4. Verb usage: Knock on the door and find out if they're home.
  5. Verb usage: I knocked against the table and bruised my leg.
  6. Verb usage: Don't knock it until you've tried it.

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