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Staple can be a verb or a noun.

staple used as a verb:

  1. To secure with a staple.

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 →

staple used as a noun:

  1. A basic or essential supply.
  2. A basic food.
    "Rice is a staple in the diet of many cultures."
  3. A wire fastener used to secure stacks of paper by penetrating all the sheets and curling around.
  4. A wire fastener used to secure something else by penetrating and curling.
    "Can you believe they use staples to hold cars together these days?"
  5. A U-shaped metal fastener, used to attach fence wire or other material to posts or structures.
    "The rancher used staples to attach the barbed wire to the fence-posts."
  6. One of a set of U-shaped metal rods hammered into a structure, such as a piling or wharf, which serve as a ladder.
    "Fortunately, there were staples in the quay wall, and she was able to climb out of the water."
  7. The length of the fibers in cotton, sheep's wool, or the like, a measure of its usefulness for spinning

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 staple?

As detailed above, 'staple' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: Rice is a staple in the diet of many cultures.
  2. Noun usage: Can you believe they use staples to hold cars together these days?
  3. Noun usage: The rancher used staples to attach the barbed wire to the fence-posts.
  4. Noun usage: Fortunately, there were staples in the quay wall, and she was able to climb out of the water.

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