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Pat can be an adverb, an adjective, a noun or a verb.

pat used as an adverb:

  1. opportunely, in a timely or suitable way
    "1600: Now might I do it pat — William Shakespeare, Hamlet III.iii"

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

pat used as an adjective:

  1. trite, being superficially complete, lacking originality
    "Your manager is not going to be satisfied with your pat ideas for the new project."
  2. timely and suitable

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 →

pat used as a noun:

  1. The sound of a light slap or tap with a soft flat object, especially of a footstep
  2. A light tap or slap, especially with the hands
  3. A flattish lump of soft matter, especially butter or dung.
  4. patent

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 →

pat used as a verb:

  1. To (gently) tap the flat of one's hand on a person or thing.
    "To show affection, he decided he would pat the boy on the head."
  2. To hit lightly and repeatedly with the flat of the hand to make smooth or flat
    "I patted the cookie dough into shape."
  3. To gently rain.

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 →

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What type of word is pat?

As detailed above, 'pat' can be an adverb, an adjective, a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: 1600: Now might I do it pat — William Shakespeare, Hamlet III.iii
  2. Adjective usage: Your manager is not going to be satisfied with your pat ideas for the new project.
  3. Verb usage: To show affection, he decided he would pat the boy on the head.
  4. Verb usage: I patted the cookie dough into shape.

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