Word Type
Play can be a noun or a verb.
play used as a noun:
- Activity for amusement only, especially among the young.
- The conduct, or course of a game.
- An individual's performance in a sport or game.
- (turn-based games) An action carried out when it is one's turn to play.
- A literary composition, intended to be represented by actors impersonating the characters and speaking the dialogue.
- A theatrical performance featuring actors.
- A major move by a business.
- A geological formation that contains an accumulation or prospect of hydrocarbons or other resources.
- The extent to which a part of a mechanism can move freely.
"No wonder the fanbelt is slipping: there’s too much play in it." - Sexual role-playing (as in , , ).
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 →
play used as a verb:
- To act in a manner such that one has fun; to engage in activities expressly for the purpose of recreation.
"They played long and hard." - To take part in amorous activity; to make love, fornicate; to have sex.
- To play a sport.
"He plays on three teams." - To produce music using a musical instrument.
"I've practiced the piano off and on, and I still can't play very well." - To act in a performance as the indicated role.
"He plays the King, and she's the Queen." - To participate in the game indicated.
"play football, play sports, play games" - To produce music on the indicated musical instrument.
"I'll play the piano and you sing." - To produce music, the indicated song or style, with a musical instrument.
"We especially like to play jazz together." - To use a device to watch or listen to the indicated recording.
"You can play the DVD now." - Contrary to fact, to give an appearance of being.
- In a game or game-like setting, to maintain a posture of being.
"Play nice, children."
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 play?
- Noun usage: No wonder the fanbelt is slipping: there’s too much play in it.
- Noun usage: Too much play in a steering wheel may be dangerous.
- Verb usage: They played long and hard.
- Verb usage: He plays on three teams.
- Verb usage: Who's playing now?
- Verb usage: I've practiced the piano off and on, and I still can't play very well.
- Verb usage: He plays the King, and she's the Queen.
- Verb usage: play football, play sports, play games
- Verb usage: I'll play the piano and you sing.
- Verb usage: Can you play an instrument?
- Verb usage: We especially like to play jazz together.
- Verb usage: Play a song for me.
- Verb usage: Do you know how to play Für Elise?
- Verb usage: My son thinks he can play music.
- Verb usage: You can play the DVD now.
- Verb usage: Play nice, children.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of play 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 play, 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).