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Mother can be a verb or a noun.

mother used as a verb:

  1. To treat as a mother would be expected to treat her child; to nurture.

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 →

mother used as a noun:

  1. A (human) female who (a) parents a child or (b) gives birth to a baby. Sometimes used in reference to a pregnant female, possibly as a shortened form of mother-to-be (c).
    "(a) I am visiting my mother today."
  2. A female parent of an animal.
    "The lioness was a mother of four cubs."
  3. A female ancestor.
  4. A source or origin, viewed affectionately.
    "The Mediterranean was mother to many cultures and languages."
  5. A title of respect for one's mother-in-law.
    "Mother Smith, meet my cousin, Doug Jones."
  6. Any elderly woman, especially within a particular community
  7. Any person or entity which performs mothering.
  8. Something that is the greatest or most significant of its kind.
    ""The great duel, the mother of all battles has begun." — Saddam Hussein"
  9. motherfucker.
  10. A striking example.

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 mother?

As detailed above, 'mother' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: (a) I am visiting my mother today.
  2. Noun usage: 1988, Robert Ferro, Second Son
  3. Noun usage: He had something of his mother in him, but this was because he realized that in the end only her love was unconditional, and in gratitude he had emulated her.
  4. Noun usage: (b) My sister-in-law has just become a mother.
  5. Noun usage: (c) Nutrients and oxygen obtained by the mother are conveyed to the fetus.
  6. Noun usage: 1991, Susan Faludi, The Undeclared War Against American Women
  7. Noun usage: The antiabortion iconography in the last decade featured the fetus but never the mother.
  8. Noun usage: The lioness was a mother of four cubs.
  9. Noun usage: The Mediterranean was mother to many cultures and languages.
  10. Noun usage: Mother Smith, meet my cousin, Doug Jones.
  11. Noun usage: "The great duel, the mother of all battles has begun." — Saddam Hussein

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