Word Type
Tap can be a verb or a noun.
tap used as a verb:
- To furnish with taps.
- To draw off liquid from a vessel
"He tapped a new barrel of beer." - To place a listening or recording device on a telephone or wired connection.
"They can't tap the phone without a warrant." - To intercept a communication without authority.
"He was known to tap Cable TV and satellite dishes." - To cut an internal screw thread.
"Tap an M3 thread all the way through the hole." - To have sexual intercourse with.
"I would tap that hot girl over there. or, more informally, I'd tap that" - To strike lightly.
- To touch one's finger, foot, or other body parts on a surface (usually) repeatedly.
"He was so nervous he began to tap his fingers on the table." - To make a sharp noise.
"The tree, swaying in the breeze, began to tap on the window pane." - To designate for some duty or for membership, as in 'a tap on the shoulder'.
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 →
tap used as a noun:
- A tapering cylindrical pin or peg used to stop the vent in a cask; a spigot.
- A device used to dispense liquids.
"We don't have bottled water, you'll have to get it from the tap." - A device used to cut an internal screw thread. (External screw threads are cut with a die.)
"We drilled a hole and then cut the threads with the proper tap to match the valve's thread." - A connection made to an electrical or fluid conductor without breaking it.
"The system was barely keeping pressure due to all of the ill advised taps along its length." - Device used to listen in secretly on telephone calls.
- A repeated touching of one's hands, foot or other body part.
"When Steve felt a tap on his shoulder, he turned around."
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 tap?
- Verb usage: He tapped a new barrel of beer.
- Verb usage: They can't tap the phone without a warrant.
- Verb usage: He was known to tap Cable TV and satellite dishes.
- Verb usage: Tap an M3 thread all the way through the hole.
- Verb usage: I would tap that hot girl over there. or, more informally, I'd tap that
- Verb usage: He was so nervous he began to tap his fingers on the table.
- Verb usage: She tapped her companion on the back to indicate that she was ready to go.
- Verb usage: The tree, swaying in the breeze, began to tap on the window pane.
- Noun usage: We don't have bottled water, you'll have to get it from the tap.
- Noun usage: We drilled a hole and then cut the threads with the proper tap to match the valve's thread.
- Noun usage: The system was barely keeping pressure due to all of the ill advised taps along its length.
- Noun usage: When Steve felt a tap on his shoulder, he turned around.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of tap 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 tap, 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).