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The can be an adverb or a determiner.

the used as an adverb:

  1. With a comparative or more and a verb phrase, establishes a parallel with one or more other such comparatives.
    "The hotter, the better."
  2. With a comparative, and often with for it, indicates a result in the direction of the comparative. This can be negated with none.
    "It was a difficult time, but I’m the wiser for it."

An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →

the used as a determiner:

  1. Definite grammatical article that implies necessarily that the entity it articulates is presupposed; something already mentioned, or completely specified later in the same sentence, or assumed already completely specified. Compare I’m reading a book with I’m reading the book.
    "The street in front of your house. (But compare a street in Paris)"
  2. When stressed, indicates that the object in question is considered to be best or exclusively worthy of attention.
    "That is the hospital to go to for heart surgery."
  3. With a superlative, it refers to the same thing which the superlative applies to.
    "That apple pie was the best."
  4. When before a body part, it can be an alternative to a possessive pronoun.
    "A stone hit him on the head. ( = “A stone hit him on his head.”)"
  5. When before an adjectival noun, it indicates all persons within that grouping.
    "Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."
  6. When before the name of a member of a class, it indicates all things in that class.
    "The cat is a solitary creature. ( = “All cats are solitary creatures.”)"

Determiners are a special kind of describing word used with nouns. In the sentence "Some people don't eat animals." the determiner "some" modifies the "people" noun so that refers specifically to a subset of people. In the sentence "The person doesn't eat animals." the determiner "the" modifies the "person" noun so it refers to a specific person that would be evident if we had more context. Learn more →

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What type of word is the?

As detailed above, 'the' can be an adverb or a determiner. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Adverb usage: The hotter, the better.
  2. Adverb usage: The more I think about it, the weaker it looks.
  3. Adverb usage: The more money donated, the more books purchased and the more happy children.
  4. Adverb usage: It looks weaker and weaker, the more I think about it.
  5. Adverb usage: It was a difficult time, but I’m the wiser for it.
  6. Adverb usage: It was a difficult time, and I’m none the wiser for it.
  7. Determiner usage: The street in front of your house. (But compare a street in Paris)
  8. Determiner usage: The men and women watched the man give the birdseed to the bird.
  9. Determiner usage: That is the hospital to go to for heart surgery.
  10. Determiner usage: That apple pie was the best.
  11. Determiner usage: A stone hit him on the head. ( = “A stone hit him on his head.”)
  12. Determiner usage: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
  13. Determiner usage: The cat is a solitary creature. ( = “All cats are solitary creatures.”)

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