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Mean can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.

mean used as a noun:

  1. An intermediate step or intermediate steps.
  2. The average, the arithmetic mean.
  3. Loosely, an intermediate value or range of values; a mid-value; a vague average.
  4. Any function of multiple variables that satisfies certain properties and yields a number representative of its arguments; or, the number so yielded; a measure of central tendency.
  5. Either of the two numbers in the middle of a conventionally presented proportion, as 2 and 3 in 1:2=3:6.

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 →

mean used as a verb:

  1. To convey, signify, or indicate.
    "What does this hieroglyph mean?"
  2. To want or intend to convey.
    "I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean."
  3. To intend; to plan on doing.
    "I didn't mean to knock your tooth out."
  4. To have conviction in what one says.
    "Does she really mean what she said to him last night?"
  5. To have intentions of a some kind.
    "Don't be angry; she meant well."
  6. To result in; to bring about.
    "One faltering step means certain death."

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 →

mean used as an adjective:

  1. Causing or intending to cause intentional harm; bearing ill will towards another; cruel; malicious.
    "Watch out for her, she's mean. I said good morning to her, and she punched me in the nose."
  2. Miserly; stingy.
    "He's so mean. I've never seen him spend so much as five pounds on presents for his children."
  3. Selfish; acting without consideration of others; unkind.
    "It was mean to steal the girl's piggy bank, but he just had to get uptown and he had no cash of his own."
  4. Powerful; fierce; harsh; damaging.
    "It must have been a mean typhoon that levelled this town."
  5. Accomplished with great skill; deft; hard to compete with.
    "Your mother can roll a mean cigarette."
  6. Low in quality; inferior.
  7. Having the mean (see noun below) as its value.

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 →

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What type of word is mean?

As detailed above, 'mean' can be a noun, a verb or an adjective. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: What does this hieroglyph mean?
  2. Verb usage: The sky is red this morning—does that mean we're in for a storm?
  3. Verb usage: I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean.
  4. Verb usage: Say what you mean and mean what you say.
  5. Verb usage: I didn't mean to knock your tooth out.
  6. Verb usage: I mean to go to Baddeck this summer.
  7. Verb usage: I meant to take the car in for a smog check, but it slipped my mind.
  8. Verb usage: Does she really mean what she said to him last night?
  9. Verb usage: Say what you mean and mean what you say.
  10. Verb usage: Don't be angry; she meant well.
  11. Verb usage: Someone's coming up. He means business.
  12. Verb usage: One faltering step means certain death.
  13. Adjective usage: Watch out for her, she's mean. I said good morning to her, and she punched me in the nose.
  14. Adjective usage: He's so mean. I've never seen him spend so much as five pounds on presents for his children.
  15. Adjective usage: It was mean to steal the girl's piggy bank, but he just had to get uptown and he had no cash of his own.
  16. Adjective usage: It must have been a mean typhoon that levelled this town.
  17. Adjective usage: Your mother can roll a mean cigarette.
  18. Adjective usage: He hits a mean backhand.

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