Word Type
Approach can be a verb or a noun.
approach used as a verb:
- To come or go near, in place or time; to draw nigh; to advance nearer.
"Wherefore approached ye so nigh unto the city? —2 Sam. xi. 20." - To draw near, in a figurative sense; to make advances; to approximate.
"as he approaches to the character of the ablest statesman." - To come near to in place, time, or character; to draw nearer to; as, to approach the city; to approach my cabin; he approached the age of manhood.
"He was an admirable poet, and thought even to have approached Homer. -- Sir William Temple." - To take approaches to.
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 →
approach used as a noun:
- The act of drawing near; a coming or advancing near.
"The approach of summer. — Samuel Horsley." - An access, or opportunity of drawing near.
"The approach to kings and principal persons. — Francis Bacon." - Movements to gain favor; advances.
- A way, passage, or avenue by which a place or buildings can be approached; an access. — Thomas Babington Macaulay.
- A manner in which a problem is solved or policy is made.
"an approach to gardening" - The advanced works, trenches, or covered roads made by besiegers in their advances toward a fortress or military post.
- A stroke whose object is to land the ball on the putting green. It is made with an iron club.
- The way a plane lands at an airport.
- The area before the lane, in which a player may stand or run up before bowling the ball.
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 approach?
- Verb usage: Wherefore approached ye so nigh unto the city? —2 Sam. xi. 20.
- Verb usage: But exhorting one another; and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching. —Heb. x. 25.
- Verb usage: as he approaches to the character of the ablest statesman.
- Verb usage: He was an admirable poet, and thought even to have approached Homer. -- Sir William Temple.
- Noun usage: The approach of summer. — Samuel Horsley.
- Noun usage: A nearer approach to the human type. — Richard Owen.
- Noun usage: The approach to kings and principal persons. — Francis Bacon.
- Noun usage: an approach to gardening
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of approach 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 approach, 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).
