Word Type
Alternate can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
alternate used as an adjective:
- Being or succeeding by turns; one following the other in succession of time or place; by turns first one and then the other; hence, reciprocal.
"And bid alternate passions fall and rise. -Alexander Pope" - Designating the members in a series, which regularly intervene between the members of another series, as the odd or even numbers of the numerals; every other; every second.
"the alternate members 1, 3, 5, 7, etc." - Other or alternative.
- Distributed, as leaves, singly at different heights of the stem, and at equal intervals as respects angular divergence. --Gray.
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 →
alternate used as a noun:
- That which alternates with something else; vicissitude.
"Grateful alternates of substantial. -Matthew Prior" - A substitute; an alternative; one designated to take the place of another, if necessary, in performing some duty.
- A proportion derived from another proportion by interchanging the means.
- A replacement of equal or greater value or function.
- Figures or tinctures that succeed each other by turns.
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 →
alternate used as a verb:
- To perform by turns, or in succession; to cause to succeed by turns; to interchange regularly.
- To happen, succeed, or act by turns; to follow reciprocally in place or time;—followed by with.
"The flood and ebb tides alternate with each other." - To vary by turns.
"The land alternates between rocky hills and sandy plains."
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 →
Related Searches
What type of word is alternate?
- Adjective usage: And bid alternate passions fall and rise. -Alexander Pope
- Adjective usage: the alternate members 1, 3, 5, 7, etc.
- Noun usage: Grateful alternates of substantial. -Matthew Prior
- Verb usage: The flood and ebb tides alternate with each other.
- Verb usage: The land alternates between rocky hills and sandy plains.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of alternate 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 alternate, 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).