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Roll can be a verb or a noun.

roll used as a verb:

  1. To cause to revolve by turning over and over; to move by turning on an axis; to impel forward by causing to turn over and over on a supporting surface.
    "to roll a wheel, a ball, or a barrel."
  2. To wrap round on itself; to form into a spherical or cylindrical body by causing to turn over and over.
    "to roll a sheet of paper; to roll clay or putty into a ball."
  3. To bind or involve by winding, as in a bandage; to inwrap; often with up.
    "to roll up the map for shipping."
  4. To drive or impel forward with an easy motion, as of rolling.
    "This river will roll its waters to the ocean."
  5. To utter copiously, especially with sounding words; to utter with a deep sound; -- often with forth, or out.
    "to roll forth someone's praises; to roll out sentences."
  6. To press or level with a roller; to spread or form with a roll, roller, or rollers.
    "to roll a field; to roll paste; to roll steel rails."
  7. To move, or cause to be moved, upon, or by means of, rollers or small wheels.
  8. To leave or begin a journey.
    "I want to get there early, let's roll."
  9. To compete, especially with vigor.
    "OK guys, we're only down by 2 points, let's roll!"
  10. To beat with rapid, continuous strokes, as a drum; to sound a roll upon.
  11. To apply (one line or surface) to another without slipping; to bring all the parts of (one line or surface) into successive contact with another, in such a manner that at every instant the parts that have been in contact are equal.
  12. To turn over in one's mind; to revolve.
  13. To behave in a certain way; to adopt a general disposition toward a situation.
    "I was going to kick his ass, but he wasn't worth getting all worked up over, I don't roll like that."
  14. To throw dice.
  15. To roll dice such that they form a given pattern or total.
    "If you roll doubles, you get an extra turn."
  16. To have a rolling aspect
    "the hills rolled on"
  17. To create a new character in a role-playing game.
    "I'm gonna go and roll a new shaman tonight."
  18. To generate a random number.
  19. To turn over and over.
    "The child will roll on the floor."
  20. To tumble in gymnastics.
  21. when a nautical vessel rotates on its fore-and-aft axis, causing its sides to go up and down. Compare with pitch.
  22. To beat up.
  23. To cause to betray secrets of or testify against.
    "The feds rolled him by giving him a free pass for most of what he'd done."
  24. To betray secrets.
    "He rolled on those guys after being in jail two days."

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 →

roll used as a noun:

  1. The act of rolling, or state of being rolled.
    "Look at the roll of a ball."
  2. That which rolls; a roller
  3. Specifically, a heavy cylinder used to break clods.
  4. Specifically, one of a set of revolving cylinders, or rollers, between which metal is pressed, formed, or smoothed, as in a rolling mill; as, to pass rails through the rolls.
  5. That which is rolled up; as, a roll of fat, of wool, paper, cloth, etc.
  6. Specifically, a document written on a piece of parchment, paper, or other materials which may be rolled up; a scroll.
  7. Hence, an official or public document; a register; a record; also, a catalogue; a list.
  8. Specifically, a quantity of cloth wound into a cylindrical form; as, a roll of carpeting; a roll of ribbon.
  9. Specifically, A cylindrical twist of tobacco.
  10. A kind of shortened raised biscuit or bread, often rolled or doubled upon itself.
  11. The oscillating movement of a vessel from side to side, in sea way, as distinguished from the alternate rise and fall of bow and stern called pitching.
  12. A heavy, reverberatory sound.
    "Hear the roll of cannon."
  13. The uniform beating of a drum with strokes so rapid as scarcely to be distinguished by the ear.
  14. Part; office; duty; rôle.
  15. A measure of parchments, containing five dozen.
  16. the rotation angle about the longitudinal axis
    "Calculate the roll of that aircraft."
  17. The act of, or total resulting from, rolling one or more dice.
    "Make your roll."
  18. The measure of extent to which a nautical vessel rotates on its fore-and-aft axis, causing its sides to go up and down. Compare with pitch.

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 roll?

As detailed above, 'roll' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: to roll a wheel, a ball, or a barrel.
  2. Verb usage: to roll a sheet of paper; to roll clay or putty into a ball.
  3. Verb usage: to roll up the map for shipping.
  4. Verb usage: This river will roll its waters to the ocean.
  5. Verb usage: to roll forth someone's praises; to roll out sentences.
  6. Verb usage: to roll a field; to roll paste; to roll steel rails.
  7. Verb usage: I want to get there early, let's roll.
  8. Verb usage: OK guys, we're only down by 2 points, let's roll!
  9. Verb usage: I was going to kick his ass, but he wasn't worth getting all worked up over, I don't roll like that.
  10. Verb usage: If you roll doubles, you get an extra turn.
  11. Verb usage: With two dice, you're more likely to roll seven than ten.
  12. Verb usage: the hills rolled on
  13. Verb usage: I'm gonna go and roll a new shaman tonight.
  14. Verb usage: The child will roll on the floor.
  15. Verb usage: The feds rolled him by giving him a free pass for most of what he'd done.
  16. Verb usage: He rolled on those guys after being in jail two days.
  17. Noun usage: Look at the roll of a ball.
  18. Noun usage: Look at the roll of waves.
  19. Noun usage: Hear the roll of cannon.
  20. Noun usage: Hear the roll of thunder.
  21. Noun usage: Calculate the roll of that aircraft.
  22. Noun usage: Make your roll.
  23. Noun usage: Whoever gets the highest roll moves first.

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