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literally is an adverb:

  1. Word for word; not as an idiom or metaphor.
    "When he said Houston weather is warm and you never need a long sleeve shirt, I literally threw all my long sleeve shirts away!"
  2. Simply; with reference to the first meaning of a word.
    "Ants got into my computer and literally scrambled my data: Bugs were in my hardware."
  3. Without hyperbole or slang.
  4. Used as an intensifier; really, very
  5. Used as a generic downtoner.
    "You literally put it in the microwave for five minutes and it's done."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

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What type of word is literally?

As detailed above, 'literally' is an adverb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: When he said Houston weather is warm and you never need a long sleeve shirt, I literally threw all my long sleeve shirts away!
  2. Adverb usage: Ants got into my computer and literally scrambled my data: Bugs were in my hardware.
  3. Adverb usage: You literally put it in the microwave for five minutes and it's done.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of literally 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 literally, and guess at its most common usage.

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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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