Word Type
Till can be a conjunction, a preposition, a verb or a noun.
till used as a conjunction:
- Up to the time that (something is true).
- Before (something is true).
Conjunctions are connector words. Examples of conjunctions are: and, but, so. They help us to group words and connect phrases, like in the sentence: "We have apples and oranges, but we need bananas." Learn more →
till used as a preposition:
- Up to.
"1582: …that you stir not up, nor make the beloved to awake, till she please. Douay-Rheims bible, Book 24: Canticle of Canticles 2:7" - As late as.
Prepositions are used to show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word. Examples of prepositions are: in, during, beside, after, for. In the sentence "Sows suffer in factory farms." The preposition "in" tells us the position of the sow relative to the factory farm. Learn more →
till used as a verb:
- To develop so as to improve or prepare for usage; to cultivate (said of knowledge, virtue, mind etc).
- To work or cultivate or plough (soil); to prepare for growing vegetation and crops.
- To cultivate soil.
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 →
till used as a noun:
- A cash register
- A removable box within a cash drawer containing the money
"Pull all the tills and lock them in the safe" - The contents of a cash register or of a cash drawer, for example, at the beginning or end of the day or of a cashier's shift.
"My count of my till was 30 dollars short." - Glacial drift consisting of a mixture of clay, sand, pebbles and boulders.
- Manure or other material used to fertilize land.
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 till?
- Preposition usage: 1582: …that you stir not up, nor make the beloved to awake, till she please. Douay-Rheims bible, Book 24: Canticle of Canticles 2:7
- Preposition usage: 1846:She twirled round and round,/Till she sunk underground, … --Edward Lear The Book of Nonsense
- Preposition usage: 1912: And the Mouse sat and laughed till he cried. --Anon. Punky Dunk and the Mouse Pub. P.F. Volland & Co.
- Noun usage: Pull all the tills and lock them in the safe
- Noun usage: My count of my till was 30 dollars short.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of till 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 till, 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).