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Wear can be a noun or a verb.

wear used as a noun:

  1. (in combination) Clothing (such as footwear).
  2. Damage to the appearance and/or strength of an item caused by use over time.
  3. fashion

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 →

wear used as a verb:

  1. To carry or have equipped on or about one's body, as an item of clothing, equipment, decoration, etc.
    "He's wearing some nice pants today."
  2. To have or carry on one's person habitually, consistently; or, to maintain in a particular fashion or manner.
    "He wears eyeglasses."
  3. To bear or display in one's aspect or appearance.
    "She wore a smile all day."
  4. To eat away at, erode, diminish, or consume gradually; to cause a gradual deterioration in; to produce (some change) through attrition, exposure, or constant use.
    "You're going to wear a hole in the bottom of those shoes."
  5. To undergo gradual deterioration; become impaired; be reduced or consumed gradually due to any continued process, activity, or use. See also wear away, wear down, wear off, wear out, wear thin.
    "The tiles were wearing thin due to years of children's feet."
  6. To exhaust, fatigue, expend, or weary. See also wear out.
    "His neverending criticism has finally worn my patience."
  7. To last or remain durable under hard use or over time; to retain usefulness, value, or desirable qualities under any continued strain or long period of time; sometimes said of a person, regarding the quality of being easy or difficult to tolerate.
    "Don't worry, this fabric will wear. These pants will last you for years."
  8. (in the phrase "wearing on (someone)") To cause annoyance, irritation, fatigue, or weariness near the point of an exhaustion of patience.
    "Her high pitched voice is really wearing on me lately."
  9. (of time) To pass slowly, gradually or tediously. Often as wore on, wore away.
    "As the years wore on, we seemed to have less and less in common."
  10. To bring (a sailing vessel) onto the other tack by bringing the wind around the stern (as opposed to tacking when the wind is brought around the bow); to come round on another tack by turning away from the wind. See also gybe, jibe.

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 wear?

As detailed above, 'wear' can be a noun or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Verb usage: He's wearing some nice pants today.
  2. Verb usage: She wore her medals with pride.
  3. Verb usage: Please wear your seatbelt.
  4. Verb usage: He was wearing his lunch after tripping and falling into the buffet.
  5. Verb usage: He wears eyeglasses.
  6. Verb usage: She wears her hair in braids.
  7. Verb usage: She wore a smile all day.
  8. Verb usage: He walked out of the courtroom wearing an air of satisfaction.
  9. Verb usage: You're going to wear a hole in the bottom of those shoes.
  10. Verb usage: The water has slowly worn a channel into these rocks.
  11. Verb usage: Long illness had worn the bloom from her cheeks.
  12. Verb usage: Exile had worn the man to a shadow.
  13. Verb usage: The tiles were wearing thin due to years of children's feet.
  14. Verb usage: His neverending criticism has finally worn my patience.
  15. Verb usage: Toil and care soon wear the spirit.
  16. Verb usage: Our physical advantage allowed us to wear the other team out and win.
  17. Verb usage: Don't worry, this fabric will wear. These pants will last you for years.
  18. Verb usage: This color wears so well, I must have washed this sweater a thousand times.
  19. Verb usage: I have to say, our friendship has worn pretty well.
  20. Verb usage: It's hard to get to know him, but he wears well.
  21. Verb usage: Her high pitched voice is really wearing on me lately.
  22. Verb usage: As the years wore on, we seemed to have less and less in common.

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