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Trap can be a verb or a noun.

trap used as a verb:

  1. To catch in a trap or traps; as, to trap foxes.
  2. To ensnare; to take by stratagem; to entrap.
  3. To provide with a trap; as, to trap a drain; to trap a sewer pipe.
  4. To set traps for game; to make a business of trapping game; as, to trap for beaver.
  5. To leave suddenly, to flee.
  6. To capture (e.g. an error) in order to handle or process it.

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 →

trap used as a noun:

  1. A machine or other device designed to catch (and sometimes kill) animals, either by holding them in a container, or by catching hold of part of the body.
    "I put down some traps in my apartment to try and deal with the mouse problem."
  2. A trick or arrangement designed to catch someone in a more general sense.
    "Unfortunately she fell into the trap of confusing biology with destiny."
  3. A covering over a hole or opening; a trapdoor.
    "Close the trap, would you, before someone falls and breaks their neck."
  4. A wooden instrument shaped somewhat like a shoe, used in the game of trapball; the game of trapball itself.
  5. Any device used to hold and suddenly release an object.
    "They shot out of the school gates like greyhounds out of the trap."
  6. A bend, sag, or other device in a waste-pipe arranged so that the liquid contents form a seal which prevents the escape of noxious gases, but permits the flow of liquids.
  7. A place in a water pipe, pump, etc., where air accumulates for want of an outlet.
  8. A light two-wheeled carriage with springs.
    "Have James prepare the trap – I wish to visit the parson."
  9. A kind of movable stepladder.
  10. A persons' mouth.
    "To ask a person not to reveal any information"
  11. (plural) belongings
    "...his cabin-mates in Montana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in)..."
  12. A transvestite, a man that one engages in a relationship with, believing him to be a woman.
    "I saw your brother asking a trap out last night at the bar."
  13. An exception generated by the processor.
  14. A mining license inspector during the Australian gold rush.
  15. A dark coloured igneous rock, now used to designate any non-volcanic, non-granitic igneous rock; trap rock.

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 trap?

As detailed above, 'trap' can be a verb or a noun. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: I put down some traps in my apartment to try and deal with the mouse problem.
  2. Noun usage: Unfortunately she fell into the trap of confusing biology with destiny.
  3. Noun usage: Close the trap, would you, before someone falls and breaks their neck.
  4. Noun usage: They shot out of the school gates like greyhounds out of the trap.
  5. Noun usage: Have James prepare the trap – I wish to visit the parson.
  6. Noun usage: To ask a person not to reveal any information
  7. Noun usage: Keep your trap shut.
  8. Noun usage: ...his cabin-mates in Montana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in)...
  9. Noun usage: I saw your brother asking a trap out last night at the bar.

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