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Nip can be a verb or a noun.

nip used as a verb:

  1. To catch and enclose or compress tightly between two surfaces, or points which are brought together or closed; to pinch; to close in upon.
    ""May this hard earth cleave to the Nadir hell, Down, down, and close again, and nip me flat, If I be such a traitress." — Alfred Tennyson"
  2. To remove by pinching, biting, or cutting with two meeting edges of anything; to clip.
    ""The small shoots ... must be nipt off." — John Mortimer The Whole Art of Husbandry [http://books.google.com/books?id=8xUAAAAAQAAJ&dq=Mortimer+Husbandry&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=1HLku_7UyP&sig=KiV7y-C6oYl6vgQgmYSeNC0cPSY&hl=en&ei=vV7-SZmnBZi8tAOl-MHRAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA153,M1]."
  3. To blast, as by frost; to check the growth or vigor of; to destroy.
  4. To vex or pain, as by nipping; hence, to taunt.
    ""And sharp remorse his heart did prick and nip." — Edmund Spenser"
  5. To make a quick, short journey or errand; usually roundtrip.

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 →

nip used as a noun:

  1. A small quantity of something edible or a potable liquor.
    ""I'll just take a nip of that cake.""
  2. A nipple, usually of a woman.
  3. A playful bite.
    "The puppy gave his owner’s finger a nip."
  4. A pinch with the nails or teeth.
  5. Briskly cold weather.
    "There is a nip in the air. It is nippy outside."
  6. A seizing or closing in upon; a pinching; as, in the northern seas, the nip of masses of ice.
  7. A small cut, or a cutting off the end.
  8. A blast; a killing of the ends of plants by frost.
  9. A biting sarcasm; a taunt. (Hugh Latimer.)
  10. A short turn in a rope. Nip and tuck, a phrase signifying equality in a contest. [Low, U.S.]
  11. A pickpocket.

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 nip?

As detailed above, 'nip' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: "May this hard earth cleave to the Nadir hell, Down, down, and close again, and nip me flat, If I be such a traitress." — Alfred Tennyson
  2. Verb usage: "The small shoots ... must be nipt off." — John Mortimer The Whole Art of Husbandry [http://books.google.com/books?id=8xUAAAAAQAAJ&dq=Mortimer+Husbandry&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=1HLku_7UyP&sig=KiV7y-C6oYl6vgQgmYSeNC0cPSY&hl=en&ei=vV7-SZmnBZi8tAOl-MHRAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA153,M1].
  3. Verb usage: "And sharp remorse his heart did prick and nip." — Edmund Spenser
  4. Noun usage: "I'll just take a nip of that cake."
  5. Noun usage: "He had a nip of whiskey."
  6. Noun usage: The puppy gave his owner’s finger a nip.
  7. Noun usage: There is a nip in the air. It is nippy outside.

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