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Ruck can be a noun or a verb.

ruck used as a noun:

  1. A rapidly moving throng or mob; a pack of people actively engaged in something.
    "1873 Dandolo was constantly in the ditch, sometimes lying with his side against the bank, and had now been so hustled and driven that, had he been on the other side, he would have had no breath left to carry his rider, even in the ruck of the hunt. — Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=633717879&tag=Trollope,+Anthony:+Phineas+Redux,+1873&query=ruck&id=TroRedu Chapter 16.]"
  2. The situation formed when a runner is brought to ground and one or more members of each side are engaged above the ball, trying to win possession of it; a loose scrum.
  3. Contesting a bounce or ball up; used appositionally in "ruck contest". Rucks also used collectively either of ruckmen or of ruckmen and ruck rovers, and occasionally used in place of "followers" (including rovers too).
  4. A fight, a scuffle.
    "1914At last, out of the ruck rose Verman, disfigured and maniacal. With a wild eye he looked about him for his trusty rake; but Penrod, in horror, had long since thrown the rake out into the yard. Naturally, it had not seemed necessary to remove the lawn-mower. The frantic eye of Verman fell upon the lawnmower, and instantly he leaped to its handle. Shrilling a wordless war-cry, he charged, propelling the whirling, deafening knives straight upon the prone legs of Rupe Collins. Booth Tarkington, Penrod, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=611097210&tag=Tarkington,+Booth,+1869-1946:+Penrod,+1914&query=ruck&id=TarPenr Chapter 23.]"
  5. The commonplace; the lower social classes.
    "1874 He is well born." "His being higher in learning and birth than the ruck o' soldiers is anything but a proof of his worth. It shows his course to be down'ard." — Thomas Hardy, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=342267433&tag=Hardy,+Thomas:+Far+from+the+Madding+Crowd,+1874&query=ruck&id=HarMadd Far from the Madding Crowd.]"
  6. A crease, a wrinkle, a pucker, as on fabric.

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 →

ruck used as a verb:

  1. To act as a ruckman in a stoppage in Australian Rules football.
  2. To crease or fold.
  3. To become folded.
    "1917 "Will you come over now and try on your dress?" Ally asked, looking at her with wistful admiration. "I want to be sure the sleeves don't ruck up the same as they did yesterday." — Edith Wharton, Summer, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=727838576&tag=Wharton,+Edith,+1862-1937:+Summer;+a+novel,+1917&query=ruck&id=WhaSumm Chapter 12.]"

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 →

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What type of word is ruck?

As detailed above, 'ruck' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: 1873 Dandolo was constantly in the ditch, sometimes lying with his side against the bank, and had now been so hustled and driven that, had he been on the other side, he would have had no breath left to carry his rider, even in the ruck of the hunt. — Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=633717879&tag=Trollope,+Anthony:+Phineas+Redux,+1873&query=ruck&id=TroRedu Chapter 16.]
  2. Noun usage: 1914At last, out of the ruck rose Verman, disfigured and maniacal. With a wild eye he looked about him for his trusty rake; but Penrod, in horror, had long since thrown the rake out into the yard. Naturally, it had not seemed necessary to remove the lawn-mower. The frantic eye of Verman fell upon the lawnmower, and instantly he leaped to its handle. Shrilling a wordless war-cry, he charged, propelling the whirling, deafening knives straight upon the prone legs of Rupe Collins. Booth Tarkington, Penrod, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=611097210&tag=Tarkington,+Booth,+1869-1946:+Penrod,+1914&query=ruck&id=TarPenr Chapter 23.]
  3. Noun usage: 1874 He is well born." "His being higher in learning and birth than the ruck o' soldiers is anything but a proof of his worth. It shows his course to be down'ard." — Thomas Hardy, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=342267433&tag=Hardy,+Thomas:+Far+from+the+Madding+Crowd,+1874&query=ruck&id=HarMadd Far from the Madding Crowd.]
  4. Verb usage: 1917 "Will you come over now and try on your dress?" Ally asked, looking at her with wistful admiration. "I want to be sure the sleeves don't ruck up the same as they did yesterday." — Edith Wharton, Summer, [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=727838576&tag=Wharton,+Edith,+1862-1937:+Summer;+a+novel,+1917&query=ruck&id=WhaSumm Chapter 12.]

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