WordType Logo

Word Type

Stake can be a verb or a noun.

stake used as a verb:

  1. To fasten, support, or defend with stakes; as, to stake vines or plants.
  2. To pierce or wound with a stake.
  3. To put at hazard upon the issue of competition, or upon a future contingency; to wager; to pledge.
    "I'll stake yon lamb, that near the fountain plays. -- Alexander Pope."
  4. To provide another with money in order to play.
    "John went broke, so in order to play Jill had to stake him"

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 →

stake used as a noun:

  1. A piece of wood or other material, usually long and slender, pointed at one end so as to be easily driven into the ground as a support or stay; as, a stake to support vines, fences, hedges, etc.
    "A sharpened stake strong Dryas found. --Dryden"
  2. A stick inserted upright in a lop, eye, or mortise, at the side or end of a cart, a flat car, or the like, to prevent goods from falling off.
  3. The piece of timber to which a martyr was affixed to be burned.
  4. A share or interest in a business or a given situation (in the sense "stake a claim").
  5. A small anvil usually furnished with a tang to enter a hole in a bench top, as used by tinsmiths, blacksmiths, etc., for light work, punching upon, etc.
  6. That which is laid down as a wager; that which is staked or hazarded; a pledge.
  7. A territorial division.
    "Every city, or stake, including a chief town and surrounding towns, has its president, with two counselors; and this president has a high council of chosen men. — Schaff-Herzog Encyc."

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 stake?

As detailed above, 'stake' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: I'll stake yon lamb, that near the fountain plays. -- Alexander Pope.
  2. Verb usage: John went broke, so in order to play Jill had to stake him
  3. Noun usage: A sharpened stake strong Dryas found. --Dryden
  4. Noun usage: A piece of wood driven in the ground used in the game of croquet. The stake, often referred to as the peg, is placed in the middle of the court and is used as the finishing point after scoring 12 hoops in croquet.
  5. Noun usage: Every city, or stake, including a chief town and surrounding towns, has its president, with two counselors; and this president has a high council of chosen men. — Schaff-Herzog Encyc.

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