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Rat can be a verb or a noun.

rat used as a verb:

  1. to betray someone and tell their secret to an authority or an enemy; to turn someone in, bewray.
    "He ratted on his coworker."
  2. To kill rats.

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 →

rat used as a noun:

  1. Any of about 56 different species of small, omnivorous rodents belonging to the genus Rattus.
  2. A term indiscriminately applied to numerous members of several rodent families (e.g. voles and mice) having bodies longer than about 12 cm, or 5 inches.
  3. A person who is known for betrayal; a scoundrel.
    "What a rat, leaving us stranded here!"
  4. An informant or snitch
  5. A person who routinely spends time at a particular location.
    "Our teenager has become a mall rat."
  6. A promiscuous person - often a young female - who attends sporting and other entertainment events, primarily to seek sexual liaisons with athletes, entertainers and/or others traveling with them; a groupie.
  7. Informer.
  8. Scab
  9. North West London slang term for Vagina, as in get your rat out.
  10. A wad of shed hair used as part of a hairstyle.

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 rat?

As detailed above, 'rat' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: He ratted on his coworker.
  2. Verb usage: He is going to rat us out!
  3. Noun usage: What a rat, leaving us stranded here!
  4. Noun usage: Our teenager has become a mall rat.
  5. Noun usage: He loved hockey and was a devoted rink rat.

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