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rover is a noun:

  1. (usually plural) A randomly selected target.
    "1890 "By my hilt! no. There was little Robby Withstaff, and Andrew Salblaster, and Wat Alspaye, who broke the neck of the German. Mon Dieu! what men they were! Take them how you would, at long butts or short, hoyles, rounds, or rovers, better bowmen never twirled a shaft over their thumb-nails." — Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=280824396&tag=Doyle,+Arthur+Conan:+The+White+Company,+1890&query=rover&id=DoyWhit Chapter 22.]"
  2. One who roves.
    "1846 But these islands, undisturbed for years, relapsed into their previous obscurity; and it is only recently that anything has been known concerning them. Once in the course of a half century, to be sure, some adventurous rover would break in upon their peaceful repose. and astonished at the unusual scene, would be almost tempted to claim the merit of a new discovery. — Herman Melville, Typee, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=476375878&tag=Melville,+Herman,+1819-1891:+Typee;+a+real+romance+of+the+South+Seas,+1846&query=rover&id=MelType Chapter 1.]"
  3. A vehicle for exploring extraterrestrial bodies.
    "The Mars Exploration Rovers will act as robot geologists while they are on the surface of Mars. [http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft_surface_rover.html NASA site.]"
  4. Position in Australian Rules football, one of three of a team's followers, who follow the ball around the ground. Formerly a position for short players, rovers in professional leagues are frequently over 183 cm (6').
  5. A pirate or pirate ship.
    "1719 The first was this: our ship making her course towards the Canary Islands, or rather between those islands and the African shore, was surprised in the grey of the morning by a Turkish rover of Sallee, who gave chase to us with all the sail she could make. — Daniel Defoe, Robinnson Crusoe, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=193219650&tag=Defoe,+Daniel:+Robinson+Crusoe,+1719&query=rover&id=DefCru1 Chapter 2.]"

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 rover?

As detailed above, 'rover' is a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: 1890 "By my hilt! no. There was little Robby Withstaff, and Andrew Salblaster, and Wat Alspaye, who broke the neck of the German. Mon Dieu! what men they were! Take them how you would, at long butts or short, hoyles, rounds, or rovers, better bowmen never twirled a shaft over their thumb-nails." — Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=280824396&tag=Doyle,+Arthur+Conan:+The+White+Company,+1890&query=rover&id=DoyWhit Chapter 22.]
  2. Noun usage: 1846 But these islands, undisturbed for years, relapsed into their previous obscurity; and it is only recently that anything has been known concerning them. Once in the course of a half century, to be sure, some adventurous rover would break in upon their peaceful repose. and astonished at the unusual scene, would be almost tempted to claim the merit of a new discovery. — Herman Melville, Typee, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=476375878&tag=Melville,+Herman,+1819-1891:+Typee;+a+real+romance+of+the+South+Seas,+1846&query=rover&id=MelType Chapter 1.]
  3. Noun usage: The Mars Exploration Rovers will act as robot geologists while they are on the surface of Mars. [http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft_surface_rover.html NASA site.]
  4. Noun usage: 1719 The first was this: our ship making her course towards the Canary Islands, or rather between those islands and the African shore, was surprised in the grey of the morning by a Turkish rover of Sallee, who gave chase to us with all the sail she could make. — Daniel Defoe, Robinnson Crusoe, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=193219650&tag=Defoe,+Daniel:+Robinson+Crusoe,+1719&query=rover&id=DefCru1 Chapter 2.]

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