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Sway can be a noun or a verb.

sway used as a noun:

  1. The act of swaying; a swaying motion; a swing or sweep of a weapon.
  2. A rocking or swinging motion.
  3. Influence, weight, or authority that inclines to one side; as, the sway of desires.
    "I doubt I'll hold much sway with someone so powerful."
  4. Preponderance; turn or cast of balance.
  5. Rule; dominion; control.
  6. A switch or rod used by thatchers to bind their work.
  7. The maximum amplitude of a vehicle's lateral motion

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 →

sway used as a verb:

  1. To move or swing from side to side; or backward and forward; to rock.
    "The trees swayed in the breeze."
  2. To move or wield with the hand; to swing; to wield; as, to sway the scepter.
  3. To influence or direct by power, authority, persuasion, or by moral force; to rule; to govern; to guide. Cf. persuade
    "Do you think you can sway their decision?"
  4. To cause to incline or swing to one side, or backward and forward; to bias; to turn; to bend; warp; as, reeds swayed by wind
    "judgment swayed by passion"
  5. To hoist
    "to sway up the yards"
  6. To be drawn to one side by weight or influence; to lean; to incline.
  7. To have weight or influence.
  8. To bear sway; to rule; to govern.

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 sway?

As detailed above, 'sway' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: I doubt I'll hold much sway with someone so powerful.
  2. Verb usage: The trees swayed in the breeze.
  3. Verb usage: Do you think you can sway their decision?
  4. Verb usage: judgment swayed by passion
  5. Verb usage: to sway up the yards

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