Word Type
Absolute can be an adjective or a noun.
absolute used as an adjective:
- Loosed from any limitation or condition; uncontrolled; unrestricted; unconditional; as, absolute authority, monarchy, sovereignty, an absolute promise or command.
- Complete in itself; perfect; consummate; faultless.
"absolute perfection" - Viewed apart from modifying influences or without comparison with other objects; actual; real; — opposed to relative and ; as, absolute motion; absolute time or space.
"Absolute rights and duties are such as pertain to man in a state of nature as contradistinguished from relative rights and duties, or such as pertain to him in his social relations." - Loosed from, or unconnected by, dependence on any other being; self-existent; self-sufficing.
"Note: In this sense God is called the Absolute by the theist. The term is also applied by the pantheist to the universe, or the total of all existence, as only capable of relations in its parts to each other and to the whole, and as dependent for its existence and its phenomena on its mutually depending forces and their laws." - Capable of being thought or conceived by itself alone; unconditioned; non-relative.
"Note: It is in dispute among philosophers whether the term, in this sense, is not applied to a mere logical fiction or abstraction, or whether the absolute, as thus defined, can be known, as a reality, by the human intellect." - Positive; clear; certain; not doubtful.
- Authoritative; peremptory.
- Pure; unmixed; as, absolute alcohol.
- Not immediately dependent on the other parts of the sentence in government; as, the case absolute. (See ablative absolute.)
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
absolute used as a noun:
- That which is independent of context-dependent interpretation, inviolate, fundamental.
- In a plane, the two imaginary circular points at infinity; in space of three dimensions, the imaginary circle at infinity.
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 absolute?
- Adjective usage: absolute perfection
- Adjective usage: absolute beauty
- Adjective usage: Absolute rights and duties are such as pertain to man in a state of nature as contradistinguished from relative rights and duties, or such as pertain to him in his social relations.
- Adjective usage: Note: In this sense God is called the Absolute by the theist. The term is also applied by the pantheist to the universe, or the total of all existence, as only capable of relations in its parts to each other and to the whole, and as dependent for its existence and its phenomena on its mutually depending forces and their laws.
- Adjective usage: Note: It is in dispute among philosophers whether the term, in this sense, is not applied to a mere logical fiction or abstraction, or whether the absolute, as thus defined, can be known, as a reality, by the human intellect.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of absolute 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 absolute, 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).
