Word Type
Pan and scan can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
pan and scan used as an adjective:
- Formatted to fit within proportions of a 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 aspect ratio television screen, with sides of the original widescreen image (especially 2.35:1 aspect ratio) cropped off.
"Paul disdained pan and scan DVD releases, always holding out for the widescreen special editions."
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 →
pan and scan used as a noun:
- The method or practice of adjusting widescreen film images, especially 2.35:1 or 2.39:1 aspect ratio, so that they can be shown within the proportions of a 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 aspect ratio television screen, by cropping off sides of the original widescreen image, as opposed to letterboxing.
"Alicia hated the person who had invented pan and scan, since the heightened panning effect aggravated her nausea when watching action movies." - A movie recording employing this technology.
"In the discount bin by the door sat a pile of pan and scans, mostly comedies, that no one would touch."
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 →
pan and scan used as a verb:
- To adjust widescreen film images so that they can be shown with standard television aspect ratios by cropping the original image, i.e. using pan and scan methods.
- To crop out (a character or object) when performing the pan and scan process, resulting in the deletion of a character or object.
"On the fullscreen version of Star Wars Episode II, only Anakin and Obi-Wan appear in the scene because Padmé was panned and scanned out."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is pan and scan?
- Adjective usage: Paul disdained pan and scan DVD releases, always holding out for the widescreen special editions.
- Noun usage: Alicia hated the person who had invented pan and scan, since the heightened panning effect aggravated her nausea when watching action movies.
- Noun usage: In the discount bin by the door sat a pile of pan and scans, mostly comedies, that no one would touch.
- Verb usage: On the fullscreen version of Star Wars Episode II, only Anakin and Obi-Wan appear in the scene because Padmé was panned and scanned out.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of pan and scan 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 pan and scan, 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).
