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Preposition can be a verb or a noun.

preposition used as a verb:

  1. To place in a location before some other event occurs.
    "It is important to preposition the material before turning on the machine."

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 →

preposition used as a noun:

  1. A closed class of non-inflecting words typically employed to connect a noun or a pronoun, in an adjectival or adverbial sense, with some other word; a particle used with a noun or pronoun (in English always in the objective case) to make a phrase limiting some other word; — so called because it is usually placed before the word with which it is phrased, as in a bridge of iron; he comes from town; it is good for food; he escaped by running. Prepositions are a heterogeneous class of words in some languages, with fuzzy boundaries that tend to overlap with other categories (like adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions) and also allow for inflected prepositions. Prepositions can be distinguished from adverbs by close examination of the sentence: if the verb is not modified directly, the word is likely a preposition. He jumped fast shows the adverb fast, while in he jumped over, over is a preposition because it implies jumping over something.
  2. A proposition; an exposition; a discourse.
    "He made a long preposition and oration — Fabyan"

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 preposition?

As detailed above, 'preposition' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: It is important to preposition the material before turning on the machine.
  2. Noun usage: He made a long preposition and oration — Fabyan

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