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Step can be a verb or a noun.

step used as a verb:

  1. To move the foot in walking; to advance or recede by raising and moving one of the feet to another resting place, or by moving both feet in succession.
  2. To walk; to go on foot; esp., to walk a little distance.
    "to step to one of the neighbors"
  3. To walk slowly, gravely, or resolutely.
    "Home the swain retreats, His flock before him stepping to the fold. - James Thomson"
  4. To move mentally; to go in imagination.
    "They are stepping almost three thousand years back into the remotest antiquity. - Alexander Pope"
  5. To set, as the foot.
  6. To fix the foot of (a mast) in its step; to erect.

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 →

step used as a noun:

  1. An advance or movement made from one foot to the other; a pace.
  2. A rest, or one of a set of rests, for the foot in ascending or descending, as a stair, or a rung of a ladder.
    "The breadth of every single step or stair should be never less than one foot. - Sir Henry Wotton"
  3. A running board where passengers step to get on and off the bus.
    "The driver must have a clear view of the step in order to prevent accidents."
  4. The space passed over by one movement of the foot in walking or running. Used also figuratively of any kind of progress.
    "One step is generally about three feet, but may be more or less."
  5. A small space or distance.
    "It is but a step."
  6. A print of the foot; a footstep; a footprint; track.
  7. A gait; manner of walking.
    "The approach of a man is often known by his step."
  8. Proceeding; measure; action; act.
    "The reputation of a man depends on the first steps he makes in the world. - Alexander Pope"
  9. () A walk; passage.
    "Conduct my steps to find the fatal tree. - John Dryden"
  10. (plural): A portable framework of stairs, much used indoors in reaching to a high position.
  11. A framing in wood or iron which is intended to receive an upright shaft; specif., a block of wood, or a solid platform upon the keelson, supporting the heel of the mast.
  12. One of a series of offsets, or parts, resembling the steps of stairs, as one of the series of parts of a cone pulley on which the belt runs
  13. A bearing in which the lower extremity of a spindle or a vertical shaft revolves.
  14. The interval between two contiguous degrees of the scale.
    "Usage note: The word tone is often used as the name of this interval; but there is evident incongruity in using tone for indicating the interval between tones. As the word scale is derived from the Italian scala, a ladder, the intervals may well be called steps."
  15. A change of position effected by a motion of translation. - William Kingdon Clifford

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 step?

As detailed above, 'step' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: to step to one of the neighbors
  2. Verb usage: Home the swain retreats, His flock before him stepping to the fold. - James Thomson
  3. Verb usage: They are stepping almost three thousand years back into the remotest antiquity. - Alexander Pope
  4. Noun usage: The breadth of every single step or stair should be never less than one foot. - Sir Henry Wotton
  5. Noun usage: The driver must have a clear view of the step in order to prevent accidents.
  6. Noun usage: One step is generally about three feet, but may be more or less.
  7. Noun usage: He improved step by step, or by steps.
  8. Noun usage: To derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in philosophy. - Isaac Newton
  9. Noun usage: It is but a step.
  10. Noun usage: The approach of a man is often known by his step.
  11. Noun usage: The reputation of a man depends on the first steps he makes in the world. - Alexander Pope
  12. Noun usage: Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, Live till to-morrow, will have passed away. - William Cowper
  13. Noun usage: I have lately taken steps . . . to relieve the old gentleman's distresses. - G. W. Cable
  14. Noun usage: Conduct my steps to find the fatal tree. - John Dryden
  15. Noun usage: Usage note: The word tone is often used as the name of this interval; but there is evident incongruity in using tone for indicating the interval between tones. As the word scale is derived from the Italian scala, a ladder, the intervals may well be called steps.

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