WordType Logo

Word Type

Scrub can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.

scrub used as an adjective:

  1. Mean; dirty; contemptible; scrubby.
    ""How solitary, how scrub, does this town look!" -Walpole."

Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →

scrub used as a verb:

  1. To rub hard; to wash with rubbing; usually, to rub with a wet brush, or with something coarse or rough, for the purpose of cleaning or brightening; as, to scrub a floor, a doorplate.
  2. To rub anything hard, especially with a wet brush; to scour;
  3. To be diligent and penurious; as, to scrub hard for a living.
  4. To call off a scheduled event; to cancel.
    "Engineers had to scrub the satellite launch due to bad weather."

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 →

scrub used as a noun:

  1. One who labors hard and lives meanly; a mean fellow.
    "We should go there in as proper a manner possible; nor altogether like the scrubs about us."
  2. One who is a freak or unable to complete easy tasks.
    "You are such a scrub! Instead of washing the dishes you put the used food on your face!"
  3. A thicket or jungle, often specified by the name of the prevailing plant; as, oak scrub, palmetto scrub, etc.
  4. One of the common livestock of a region of no particular breed or not of pure breed, esp. when inferior in size, etc. Often used to refer to male animals unsuited for breeding.
  5. Vegetation of inferior quality, though sometimes thick and impenetrable, growing in poor soil or in sand; also, brush.
  6. One who is no longer new to a game but still exhibits novice tendencies.
    ""What a scrub.""
  7. One not on the first team of players, a substitute.
  8. An instance of scrubbing.
  9. A cancellation.
  10. A worn-out brush.
  11. One who scrubs.
  12. Clothing worn while performing surgery.

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 →

Related Searches

What type of word is scrub?

As detailed above, 'scrub' can be an adjective, a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adjective usage: "How solitary, how scrub, does this town look!" -Walpole.
  2. Adjective usage: "No little scrub joint shall come on my board." -Swift.
  3. Verb usage: Engineers had to scrub the satellite launch due to bad weather.
  4. Noun usage: We should go there in as proper a manner possible; nor altogether like the scrubs about us.
  5. Noun usage: You are such a scrub! Instead of washing the dishes you put the used food on your face!
  6. Noun usage: "What a scrub."

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

Recent Queries