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legend is a noun:

  1. A story of unknown origin describing plausible but extraordinary past events. Also historical legend.
    "The legend of Troy was discovered to have historical basis."
  2. A story in which a kernel of truth is embellished to an unlikely degree.
    "The 1984 Rose Bowl prank has spawned many legends. Here's the real story."
  3. A leading protagonist in a historical legend.
    "Achilles is a legend in Greek culture."
  4. Any person of extraordinary accomplishment.
    "Michael Jordan stands as a legend in basketball."
  5. A key to the symbols and color codes on a map, chart, etc.
    "According to the legend on the map, that building is a school."
  6. The text on a coin.
  7. A fabricated backstory for spies, complete with appropriate documents and records.
    "According to his legend, he once worked for the Red Cross, spreading humanitarian aid in Africa."
  8. A worthy friend.
    "Cheers mate for fixing my car, you're a legend."

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 legend?

As detailed above, 'legend' is a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: The legend of Troy was discovered to have historical basis.
  2. Noun usage: The 1984 Rose Bowl prank has spawned many legends. Here's the real story.
  3. Noun usage: Achilles is a legend in Greek culture.
  4. Noun usage: Michael Jordan stands as a legend in basketball.
  5. Noun usage: According to the legend on the map, that building is a school.
  6. Noun usage: According to his legend, he once worked for the Red Cross, spreading humanitarian aid in Africa.
  7. Noun usage: Cheers mate for fixing my car, you're a legend.

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