Word Type
Around can be a preposition or an adverb.
around used as a preposition:
- Defining a circle or closed curve containing.
"I planted a row of lillies around the statue." - Following a path which curves near an object, with the object on the inside of the curve
"The road took a brief detour around the large rock formation, then continued straight." - Near (also applicable to time).
"I left my keys somewhere around there." - At various places in.
"The pages from the notebook were scattered around the room."
Prepositions are used to show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word. Examples of prepositions are: in, during, beside, after, for. In the sentence "Sows suffer in factory farms." The preposition "in" tells us the position of the sow relative to the factory farm. Learn more →
around used as an adverb:
- In a circular formation.
"The jackals began to gather around." - Along the edges; on every side, in all directions.
"There isn't another house here for miles around." - In random places; aimlessly, with no real direction.
"There are too many kids in the town centre, just hanging around for hours." - With circular motion; coming back to a particular place.
"Well, my luck's really turned around!" - Nearby, in the area.
"I'll see you around, mate." - Alive, existent, or present.
"How is old Bob? I heard that his health is failing."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is around?
- Preposition usage: I planted a row of lillies around the statue.
- Preposition usage: The road took a brief detour around the large rock formation, then continued straight.
- Preposition usage: I left my keys somewhere around there.
- Preposition usage: I left the house sometime around 10:00.
- Preposition usage: The pages from the notebook were scattered around the room.
- Adverb usage: The jackals began to gather around.
- Adverb usage: There isn't another house here for miles around.
- Adverb usage: There are too many kids in the town centre, just hanging around for hours.
- Adverb usage: Well, my luck's really turned around!
- Adverb usage: I'll see you around, mate.
- Adverb usage: How is old Bob? I heard that his health is failing.
- Adverb usage: Oh, he's still around.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of around 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 around, 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).
