Word Type
Light can be a verb, an adverb, a noun or an adjective.
light used as a verb:
- To start (a fire).
- To illuminate.
- To unload a ship, or to jettison material to make it lighter
- To find by chance.
"I lit upon a rare book in a second-hand bookseller's." - To alight.
"She fell out of the window but luckily lit on her feet."
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 →
light used as an adverb:
- Carrying little.
"I prefer to travel light."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
light used as a noun:
- The natural medium emanating from the sun and other very hot sources (now recognised as electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 400-750 nm), within which vision is possible.
"As you can see, this spacious dining-room gets a lot of light in the mornings." - A source of illumination.
"Put that light out!" - Spiritual or mental illumination; enlightenment, useful information.
"Can you throw any light on this problem?" - Facts. pieces of information; ideas, concepts.
- A notable person within a specific field or discipline.
"Picasso was one of the leading lights of the cubist movement." - A point of view, or aspect from which a concept, person or thing is regarded.
"I'm really seeing you in a different light today." - A flame or something used to create fire.
"Hey, buddy, you got a light?" - A window, or space for a window in architecture
"This facade has eight south-facing lights." - The series of squares reserved for the answer to a crossword clue
"The average length of a light on a 15x15 grid is 7 or 8." - A cross-light in a double acrostic or triple acrostic.
- A stone that is not thrown hard enough.
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 →
light used as an adjective:
- having light
- pale in colour
- served with extra milk or cream
- Of low weight; not heavy.
"My bag was much lighter once I had dropped off the books." - Lightly-built; designed for speed or small loads.
"We took a light aircraft down to the city." - Gentle; having little force or momentum.
"This artist clearly had a light, flowing touch." - Low in fat, calories, alcohol, salt, etc.
"This light beer still gets you drunk if you have enough of it." - Unimportant, trivial, having little value or significance.
"I made some light comment, and we moved on." - Unchaste, wanton.
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is light?
- Verb usage: I lit upon a rare book in a second-hand bookseller's.
- Verb usage: She fell out of the window but luckily lit on her feet.
- Adverb usage: I prefer to travel light.
- Noun usage: As you can see, this spacious dining-room gets a lot of light in the mornings.
- Noun usage: Put that light out!
- Noun usage: Can you throw any light on this problem?
- Noun usage: Picasso was one of the leading lights of the cubist movement.
- Noun usage: I'm really seeing you in a different light today.
- Noun usage: Magoon's governorship in Cuba was viewed in a negative light by many Cuban historians for years thereafter.
- Noun usage: Hey, buddy, you got a light?
- Noun usage: This facade has eight south-facing lights.
- Noun usage: The average length of a light on a 15x15 grid is 7 or 8.
- Adjective usage: My bag was much lighter once I had dropped off the books.
- Adjective usage: We took a light aircraft down to the city.
- Adjective usage: This artist clearly had a light, flowing touch.
- Adjective usage: This light beer still gets you drunk if you have enough of it.
- Adjective usage: I made some light comment, and we moved on.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of light 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 light, 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).